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PoliGAF 2017 |OT1| From Russia with Love

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mo60

Member
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/...awmakers.html?referer=https://t.co/D1SGIHTCA6

ALL REPUBLICANS ARE BAD.
ALL REPUBLICANS ARE BAD.
ALL REPUBLICANS ARE BAD.

Tattoo this to your fucking arm to make sure you fucking remember it.



This is not remotely fun.

I meant interesting. Also, canadian politicians including trudeau and obviously the left wing government in Alberta are running in circles right now trying to understand what effects trump's policies will have on Canada.
 

Nelo Ice

Banned
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/...awmakers.html?referer=https://t.co/D1SGIHTCA6

ALL REPUBLICANS ARE BAD.
ALL REPUBLICANS ARE BAD.
ALL REPUBLICANS ARE BAD.

Tattoo this to your fucking arm to make sure you fucking remember it.

Also, the GOP thinks Trump will help them accomplish their agenda and they're putting up with him to accomplish their agenda? THEY HAVE NO FUCKING AGENDA.

They have no health care bill! Their tax bill would get 35 votes in the Senate! Those were the only two things they mentioned in the article as being on their agenda! They have fucking nothing!
Can Republicans just rebrand themselves as the Confederacy already?. They'd all fucking traitors and are hellbent on destroying the union.
 

SmokeMaxX

Member
Trump is perfect for the GOP. They can push through literally anything they want, blame it on Trump, and then impeach him over his Russian ties or whatever.
 
Trump is perfect for the GOP. They can push through literally anything they want, blame it on Trump, and then impeach him over his Russian ties or whatever.

But they have nothing!

Paul Ryan spent five months on a tax bill that no Republicans in the Senate liked.

They aren't discussing health care bills at all and nothing is going on.

They have nothing to shove through, they have nothing on the agenda, they have nothing.
 
Schindler (the observer guy) seems to have been doing this before Kushner even left so he is probably vaguely trustable or at least not as instantly suspicious as the rest of the site. He has his own blog as well and he's a huge nevertrumper
 

bgbball31

Member
http://observer.com/2017/02/donald-trump-administration-mike-flynn-russian-embassy/

So, here's the article. Particularly, these two quotes.

In light of this, and out of worries about the White House’s ability to keep secrets, some of our spy agencies have begun withholding intelligence from the Oval Office. Why risk your most sensitive information if the president may ignore it anyway? A senior National Security Agency official explained that NSA was systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, in an unprecedented move. For decades, NSA has prepared special reports for the president’s eyes only, containing enormously sensitive intelligence. In the last three weeks, however, NSA has ceased doing this, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep their best SIGINT secrets.

What’s going on was explained lucidly by a senior Pentagon intelligence official, who stated that “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM,” meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. “There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,” the official added in wry frustration.
 
Trump is perfect for the GOP. They can push through literally anything they want, blame it on Trump, and then impeach him over his Russian ties or whatever.
At this point I feel like it'd be hard to shift the blame onto Trump. The longer the GOP waits to impeach him the more it looks like they willingly sacrificed the security of the country to play politics.
 

Chichikov

Member
This is terrible.
And personally, I think the intelligence community withholding information from the executive branch is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more dangerous than the Russian having ears in the oval office. Neither is good of course, but the KGB pretty much punked all western intelligence agencies all through the cold war, and they didn't get them a whole lot. American spooks running around with little oversight got the US involved in stupid wars and undermine American interests all around the world, repeatedly.

And to be clear, this is not great, this is likely to get spies killed, and I even understand why they might be doing it, but long term this is really bad.
 

sangreal

Member
This is terrible.
And personally, I think the intelligence community withholding information from the executive branch is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more dangerous than the Russian having ears in the oval office. Neither is good of course, but the KGB pretty much punked all western intelligence agencies all through the cold war, and they didn't get them a whole lot. American spooks running around with little oversight got the US involved in stupid wars and undermine American interests all around the world, repeatedly.

And to be clear, this is not great, this is likely to get spies killed, and I even understand why they might be doing it, but long term this is really bad.

I agree with you, but I also think the article is bullshit. I'll believe it when I see it outside of the opinion section

Even if low level analysts don't trust the President, their bosses are Presidential appointees for good reason. Nobody should be rooting for intelligence agencies going rogue. I'm opposed to Mattis for the same reason -- all branches of government need to be under civilian control
 

tuxfool

Banned
This is terrible.
And personally, I think the intelligence community withholding information from the executive branch is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more dangerous than the Russian having ears in the oval office. Neither is good of course, but the KGB pretty much punked all western intelligence agencies all through the cold war, and they didn't get them a whole lot. American spooks running around with little oversight got the US involved in stupid wars and undermine American interests all around the world, repeatedly.

And to be clear, this is not great, this is likely to get spies killed, and I even understand why they might be doing it, but long term this is really bad.
You have to question whether the administration actually would have the competency to handle this stuff, or would pay attention to it. This way their betters can emphasize when something is really important.

Like grabbing the attention of a baby with a shiny new toy versus the same old toys it has played with before.
 

Ogodei

Member
This is terrible.
And personally, I think the intelligence community withholding information from the executive branch is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more dangerous than the Russian having ears in the oval office. Neither is good of course, but the KGB pretty much punked all western intelligence agencies all through the cold war, and they didn't get them a whole lot. American spooks running around with little oversight got the US involved in stupid wars and undermine American interests all around the world, repeatedly.

And to be clear, this is not great, this is likely to get spies killed, and I even understand why they might be doing it, but long term this is really bad.

It's a shit sandwich. Question is whether you trust faceless CIA bureaucrats or Trump more, and honestly i'd have to go for the spies.
 

faisal233

Member
I agree with you, but I also think the article is bullshit. I'll believe it when I see it outside of the opinion section

Even if low level analysts don't trust the President, their bosses are Presidential appointees for good reason. Nobody should be rooting for intelligence agencies going rogue. I'm opposed to Mattis for the same reason -- all branches of government need to be under civilian control

umm... the political apointees only sit at the very top. Low, mid and high levels of the IC is filled with career officers.
 

sangreal

Member
umm... the political apointees only sit at the very top. Low, mid and high levels of the IC is filled with career officers.

they're at the deputy level too. they make the hiring decisions. In fact, you don't have to read beyond that article to know how deeply politics infiltrate the career ranks. It details the issue within the NSC

I don't know about you, but in my life in corporate America people care deeply about what the people above them want
 
It's a shit sandwich. Question is whether you trust faceless CIA bureaucrats or Trump more, and honestly i'd have to go for the spies.

But that's a long term worry. Sure, Trump sucks so I'm glad he's hands off, but if the IC gets too used to running their own show, how do you stop them under a future administration? I mean, even if the next President is another Republican but still kinda sane, I'd still want the IC to go back to full briefings and shit.

The only real lesson from Hillary's email server is that people get used to their routines. If the IC starts thinking "handling shit internally before notifying the FOIA parts of gov't" is the way to go forever, then I'll be worried in the 2020's.
 

Chichikov

Member
I agree with you, but I also think the article is bullshit. I'll believe it when I see it outside of the opinion section

Even if low level analysts don't trust the President, their bosses are Presidential appointees for good reason. Nobody should be rooting for intelligence agencies going rogue. I'm opposed to Mattis for the same reason -- all branches of government need to be under civilian control
Yeah, that's probably true. It's just that the CIA has long and terrible history of keeping the executive branch and congress out of the loop and it pretty much always ended up horribly for the US.
It's a shit sandwich. Question is whether you trust faceless CIA bureaucrats or Trump more, and honestly i'd have to go for the spies.
It's not who I trust more, is what's worse, the KGB knowing everything the CIA tells the president or the CIA running around without proper oversight.
Again, the KGB pretty much knew everything the CIA did throughout the cold war, the US never had a spy in the USSR that wasn't killed or turned double agent. Fuck, Stalin knew about the nuclear bomb before Truman. It didn't really help them all that much in grand scheme of things nor did it hurt American interest terribly.
If American spooks get into the habit of running true black ops with no government oversight, well, they used to have that habit before and it will most likely won't end well and it will almost certainly last beyond the Trump administration. Those things are very hard to unfuck and it took a clusterfuck as big as Vietnam for congress to really get serious about it.
 

Breads

Banned
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/...awmakers.html?referer=https://t.co/D1SGIHTCA6

ALL REPUBLICANS ARE BAD.
ALL REPUBLICANS ARE BAD.
ALL REPUBLICANS ARE BAD.

Tattoo this to your fucking arm to make sure you fucking remember it.

Also, the GOP thinks Trump will help them accomplish their agenda and they're putting up with him to accomplish their agenda? THEY HAVE NO FUCKING AGENDA.

They have no health care bill! Their tax bill would get 35 votes in the Senate! Those were the only two things they mentioned in the article as being on their agenda! They have fucking nothing!



This is not remotely fun.

I think they mean personal agenda.

(money)
 

faisal233

Member
they're at the deputy level too. they make the hiring decisions. In fact, you don't have to read beyond that article to know how deeply politics infiltrate the career ranks. It details the issue within the NSC

I don't know about you, but in my life in corporate America people care deeply about what the people above them want

This is not corporate America. In my life in the military, I have seen ineffective commander's orders get circumvented, intentionally taken down paths of failure or in other ways have their agendas defeated.

The military is not the same as the IC, it is very much more hierarchical with clear lines of command, and even in our strictly defined community, the "bureaucracy" can successfully undermine command authority. The most successful commander understood that and always got input and buyin from his entrenched staff.

The IC is much more opaque. It is not corporate America, you can't do mass layoff and rehire new staff to enforce your will. Govt service has many layers of legal protections from political appointees and if your entire workforce doesn't believe in you, it's not hard to undermine whatever authority you have.

It is never direct, in your face insubordination that will defeat your agenda. The guys dumb enough to do that are easily replace. It is the guys who spent their lifetimes in the organization, understand where the true levers of power lie, and have mastered the political side of the job that can subvert what you are trying to do. And if what your are trying to do is batshit crazy, its extremely easy to manipulate situations to where your agenda keeps failing.
 
CIA has a history of grossly inappropriate and incompetent conduct. At least if decisions are relegated to the executive branch their is the possibility of electoral redress, if not, then things will remain stuck in a classified folder till it's too late. Plus I do think civilians can act as some sort of moderating influence on the IC's excesses
 

faisal233

Member
More than anything, being called WEAK (and also being ridiculed) are the best ways to fight against Trump and his form of fascism. That, and it's being laughed at and called weak are what worries him the most.

The turbulent beginning to his tenure may signal that the defining characteristic of Trump’s presidency will be not the strength he promised, but enduring flaccidity.

That last line...
 
But they have nothing!

Paul Ryan spent five months on a tax bill that no Republicans in the Senate liked.

They aren't discussing health care bills at all and nothing is going on.

They have nothing to shove through, they have nothing on the agenda, they have nothing.

tbh I'm just looking forward to when they finally attempt to pass something and the Dems block it. Then we can all laugh at them when they start whining about it to the press.
 
More than anything, being called WEAK (and also being ridiculed) are the best ways to fight against Trump and his form of fascism. That, and it's being laughed at and called weak are what worries him the most.

I don't think there are any words I would call the best way to fight him. Making him mad isn't going stop anything he tries to do. It might send him further off the rails.

I think there is a little to much focus on ridicule and satire right now. I don't want citizens to see him as funny and ineffective. He's a threat.
 
16k people listened to the introductory "Swing Left" call.

16684013_377042002676431_7480249778403882180_n.png


Seems to be a surprising amount of people in Alabama?
 
16k people listened to the introductory "Swing Left" call.

16684013_377042002676431_7480249778403882180_n.png


Seems to be a surprising amount of people in Alabama?

Alabama's a state that has a high floor/low ceiling because of the African-American population, but unfortunately, white people in Alabama vote like African Americans in the rest of the country.
 

CygnusXS

will gain confidence one day
I don't think there are any words I would call the best way to fight him. Making him mad isn't going stop anything he tries to do. It might send him further off the rails.

I think there is a little to much focus on ridicule and satire right now. I don't want citizens to see him as funny and ineffective. He's a threat.

I think there's a defensible argument that the best way to erode the social narrative he's established among his followers is to build a strong counter-narrative around his buffoonery. It doesn't mitigate his juridical power, but maybe his power to inspire followers to organize around him.

I think people have shown a willingness to follow awful people, as long as they're the right brand of awful. But who wants to follow a buffoon? Of course, making a counter-narrative isn't the only thing you want to be working on, but there can be a role for it.
 
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