General talk

I'm not going to have time to do a lot of reading this weekend, so expect very little from me here until Monday. That should be long enough for people to digest the Mueller Report and have some good responses to it. Right now everyone is shouting from their respective corners and only a few people are looking at this level headed. The take so far is that Barr lied in his summary (shocking), Mueller believed it was up to Congress to save the Republic (not exactly a stretch), the corruption of this administration is staggering, that Mueller couldn't prove (in a Court at least) cooperation between the Trump Campaign and Russia there is a metric shit-ton of circumstantial evidence, Sarah Sanders (when it came to legally actionable language) admits she lies for the president (again, shocking), the central crux around the question "Did the president commit obstruction of justice" depends on your legal definition for bringing prosecution of if you first have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a crime was committed to obstruct (note, most legal scholars say "no"), and basically we're all fucked until 2021 (or longer).

What do I think? Well I think the House has a duty to open Impeachment Hearings to come to conclusions which may differ from the Attorney General. The legal hurdles to impeachment are much different than the hurdles of criminal courts. The Democrats need to build their case carefully and make it an indictment of conservative politics and the philosophy and complicity of the GOP. Many liberal commentators wonder why Graham and others have become presidential boot-lickers. This is your answer (although I do believe the president, or Russia, have leverage over some of them), along with "party first and always" mindsets. They know that Trump is the embodiment of their base and holds their core beliefs. They're scared out of their minds that this will receive a public hearing in full sunlight because then the jig is up. The Democrats need to build the case (both in the public conscience and in legal terms) that any vote in the Senate against it will be an admission of guilt by association.

Don't expect it to be easy. The president is half-way to dictatorship already (the main reason why the president isn't in court right now is the people he ordered to do things either had a conscience or were very bad at their jobs). He will dig in and fight hard. This is why the Democrats need to make the fight in easy soundbites and with a phalanx of evidence that talking heads can debate about. Dems need to adopt the strategy of throwing out so many facts while discussing one issue that the opposition can't respond to everything (this has long been a conservative debate strategy). It's not enough to show the criminality, you have to frame the questions that any defense of that criminality is also criminal. You have to knock out the pillars holding the conservative edifice up, not just bricks at the top.

But to do that liberals would have to change their very nature. So my take on this will be everyone will entrench in their positions and the tit-for-tat spit fights will continue.

At the very least Congress should censure the president and people in his administration. They tried to remove President Clinton for lying about a blowjob. What we already know from the Mueller report is much, much worse.