ChiGoose

Finland joining NATO basically doubled the length of Russia’s border with NATO countries but Russia did nothing about it. If Russia was attacking Ukraine to prevent NATO encroachment, wouldn’t they have tried to stop Finland from joining? It’s almost as if the NATO talking point is a fig leaf to distract from Russia’s revanchism…

Do you honestly still believe that Russia invaded to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO?

I think this is broadly true. We didn’t expect Ukraine to put up much of a fight given their performance in 2014 (they had been modernizing their army since then but still). We dragged our feet sending weapons because we wanted Ukraine to prove they could be effective and to avoid escalation. Once it became clear that Ukraine could win given the chance and that Putin’s saber rattling was mostly empty threats, we should have just sent over whatever Ukraine wanted. Unfortunately, by then the Neville Chamberlain caucus had seized control of the House.

Please point to where I said Trump was an antisemite

The best way to avoid an expanded conflict would be to provide Ukraine what it needs to stop the Russian aggression before it expands to other countries.

I am not willing to concede that an authoritarian who has spent decades surrounding himself with yes-men and literally murdering anyone who dissents from him has an accurate understanding of reality.

Remember that one of the main reasons that Fox News was created was because Ailes did not want a future Republican president to have to resign for their crimes like Nixon did. For 30 years, what has become the biggest news channel in the country has been focused on pushing feelings to balance out any inconvenient facts. The advent of social media has expounded this problem exponentially as a significant contingent of GOP voters find the propaganda of Fox News insufficient to slake their thirst for emotional validation. They have continued to seek out sources that are less factual than even Fox. The Kremlin, Beijing, and other adversaries are exploiting this. These clickservstives don’t recognize that they are parroting propaganda but their talking points are often indistinguishable from those of the enemies of the US. Putin absolutely would do this to a NATO country if the felt that the alliance was too weak or too cowardly to invoke Article V.

Russia would love to do this to a NATO country. If they succeed here, Moldova is probably next and then NATO countries are on the table. Not to mention that Ukraine isn’t ready for NATO membership anyway. The only thing Putin understands is power, so the only way that Ukraine comes away from this without becoming a Russian vassal is by making it abundantly clear that Russian aggression will end in failure.

Shhhhh…. No thinking or logic is allowed for the appeasement crowd. Just let Russia take some land now. They won’t then continue to wage war just because that is what they’ve always done to appeasers.

It’s the exact same mistake they made with Nagy.

The Bears completely blew it by keeping Eberfluss. They should have fired the coaches to give them maximum flexibility to either keep Fields or draft a new QB considering how poorly the offense has been handled.

1. You obviously care since you keep posting about it 2. Loss of funds is pressure for a campaign. You can debate the definition of “intense” but best guess is that a significant loss of donor money would create a correspondingly significant pressure on the candidate to end their campaign 3. If actual voter support drove these decisions, he would have either been out of the race ages ago or have never entered.

No, they obviously weren’t. And if his donors decided they didn’t want to continue to support him, that would be intense pressure for him to drop out.

His donors. The people donating to Christie are the Republicans who dislike Trump but aren’t ready to support a Democrat (Think Mitt Romney, Bush types). Once DeSantis revealed himself to be the fraud he obviously was and Haley became the clear anti-Trump choice among GOP candidates, Christie became even more irrelevant than he already was. The deep pocketed donors who supported Christie so he could try to take down Trump decided that Christie was no longer their best option.

Loser finally recognizes that he’s a loser.

They are upset because conservatism requires a belief that: “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” That law enforcement would bind their group is such a foreign concept to them that they literally cannot wrap their heads around it and come up with crazy conspiracies as to why law enforcement would dare enforce the law.

Not all of them, but quite a few. So far, I am not sure I've seen anything that is clearly sanctionable (like with the Kraken lawsuits), but some of the arguments are quite dumb and come up to the line of arguably sanctionable. The thing is, we've never had a president / presidential candidate commit so many crimes, so there isn't much precedent here on a lot of the issues. In other cases, there would be a long list of history that is relevant and can provide guidance and arguments for either side. Here, there is no history on things like presidential immunity for crimes committed after their presidency and whether electioneering falls within the gray area of presidential duties. So even though it seems clear that those issues *should* be decided in favor of the prosecution, there isn't a big stack of case law to put in front of the judge. If you were to give Trump's attorneys the benefit of the doubt: where there is no case law directly on point they just interpret everything in a manner that is best for their client, even when it leads to nonsensical conclusions like "the president is required to be impeached before they can be convicted." They're throwing things against the wall to see what sticks. Strategically, however, I don't think they are trying to win these cases. He's in deep here and his chances of victory in these cases range from borderline to impossible. If you assume the goal is just to delay as long as possible in the hopes of escaping through being elected president, their strategy makes much more sense than if you think they are actually trying to win.

Yes.

I prefer not to think of him. Unfortunately, as an avid news consumer, he always seems to pop up.

I don’t understand how anyone justifies SecDef just disappearing for a few days. The White House should have been in the loop.

I really appreciate you proving my point. There are so many errors in this post that I cannot possibly correct them all (though I shall try). I don't know why people decide to only seek out information that confirms their priors, but here you are. Anyways, a couple of quick points: People brought weapons to Jan 6th While most of the Jan 6 people were likely caught up in the moment, there was a concerted, well-documented plan to cause a delay of the confirmation of the election The Oath Keepers brought guns because they thought that Trump would essentially invoke martial law, at which point their people would bring the guns from their strategic locations into the city I think most people went to the Capitol because they thought Trump was going there. He basically said as much as in his speech, so they walked over. There were some people who planned on disrupting the certification of the election. Once the building was breached, some people who did not originally intend to enter the building followed the crowd in. This is why the crimes that were charged vary quite a bit based on circumstance. Over 700 people have pleaded guilty to crimes for their actions on Jan 6th. More than 150 have been convicted of crimes for their actions on that day. Ray Epps wasn't given a pass. His name was on the FBI list for only a short period of time because once he saw it, he reached out to law enforcement and began cooperating. Despite this, he still ended up being charged with crimes Even if Ray Epps was a fed, you'd have to be a brain dead moron to commit crimes because some random dude told you to. If the Bills win the Super Bowl (knock on wood) and while you're at the parade, somebody says "let's break into city hall!" you only have yourself to blame if you do what they say. This is so unbelievably stupid that it's incredible that I have to actually type this out. Once again, and I cannot stop restating this because it's just hilarious that it's still a thing, the Ray Epps conspiracy is probably the dumbest thing to come out of the Trump era, which is really impressive considering how much idiocy we had to endure. If everything MAGA claims about him was true, it'd change... nothing. But they keep harping on it because they are too stupid to recognize this. I do love the argument of "if they hadn't committed an insurrection, you couldn't call it an insurrection. Checkmate libs!" argument at the end there. It's the only thing that I've seen that is dumber than the Ray Epps conspiracy, so congrats on that. One of the common moves by Trumpers is to paint with very broad brushes and avoid any nuance, details, or facts. They want to equate the random MAGA person who went to Trump's speech and then walked to the Capitol because Trump said he'd be there with groups that planned for an armed insurrection. Some of this is a nefarious intention to deceive, but most of it is just ignorant people who have isolated themselves from reality so they immediately reject anything that doesn't support their worldview.

That you believe it wasn’t an insurrection because it wasn’t likely to succeed and that you seem to buy into all of the Ray Epps BS (which is my favorite conspiracy because even if it was somehow true, it changes… basically nothing). Honestly, the Ray Epps thing is hilarious. Just the dumbest *****. It’s not that he’s “inconvenient,” it’s that the whole thing is so dumb it’s hard to post a response when you’re just laughing so hard at the idiocy.

I didn’t say that, but you do love showing off your lack of reading comprehension.

This is a perfect example of what someone would say if the internet had rotted their brains to the point where they no longer recognized reality.

Every accusation is a confession. Easiest way to understand the nonsense coming from the insane Right.