John Cole at Balloon Juice:
...If Barack Obama had stood next to Putin and trashed the Republicans and John McCain after beating him in the previous election the Right-Wing would be calling for firing squads. He didn’t do that, but they called for firing squads anyway.
These people are fucking monsters. Trump, Pence, the whole god damned party have got to go.
James Fallows at The Atlantic:
I am old enough to remember Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon telling lies on TV, about Vietnam in both cases, and Watergate for Nixon. I remember the travails and deceptions of Bill Clinton, and of George W. Bush in the buildup to the disastrous Iraq War.
But never before have I seen an American president consistently, repeatedly, publicly, and shockingly advance the interests of another country over those of his own government and people...
For 18 months, members of this party have averted their eyes from Trump, rather than disturb the Trump elements among their constituency or disrupt the party’s agenda on tax cuts and the Supreme Court. They already bear responsibility for what Trump has done to his office.
But with every hour that elapses after this shocking performance in Helsinki without Republicans doing anything, the more deeply they are stained by this dark moment in American leadership...
David Frum at The Atlantic:
Russia helped Donald Trump into the presidency, as Robert Mueller’s indictment vividly details. Putin, in his own voice, has confirmed that he wanted Trump elected. Standing alongside his benefactor, Trump denounced the special counsel investigating the Russian intervention in the U.S. election—and even repudiated his own intelligence appointees...
The reasons for Trump’s striking behavior—whether he was bribed or blackmailed or something else—remain to be ascertained. That he has publicly refused to defend his country’s independent electoral process—and did so jointly with the foreign dictator who perverted that process—is video-recorded fact.
And it’s a fact that has to be seen in the larger context of his actions in office: denouncing the EU as a “foe,” threatening to break up nato, wrecking the U.S.-led world trading system, intervening in both U.K. and German politics in support of extremist and pro-Russian forces, and his continued refusal to act to protect the integrity of U.S. voting systems—it adds up to a political indictment whether or not it quite qualifies as a criminal one...
Rude Pundit:
...So I can say without equivocation that, today, at his press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump offered more aid and comfort to Russia than any victim of Joe McCarthy and HUAC ever did. When Trump blamed the United States for, in essence, not doing more to prevent Russia from hacking the DNC and electoral interference, when Trump declared the investigation into Russia's election fuckery a "disaster for our country" because "I think it's kept us apart, it's kept us separated," when Trump said of his own Director of National Intelligence, "My people came to me, Dan Coates, came to me and some others they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia," he did more to undermine the United States than all the poor saps that McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and Dick Nixon accused of being spies and traitors combined...
As of right now, FIVE of the top things trending on Twitter in the Tampa region are these hashtags: #Treason, #TraitorTrump, #ImpeachTrump, Rand Paul (who recently defended trump's press conference performance), and Marina Butina (a Russian national just arrested today for illegally working as a criminal agent funneling Russian funds to the NRA's 2016 political fundraising, essentially further proof of Russian interference in our elections). Granted, Tampa is a relatively Blue region in a Red-tilting State, but this is covering a lot of Red suburban communities from Pasco, Polk, and surrounding counties. I've never seen the Tampa trends so virulently railing against a political figure/party like this.
Myself:
If we are hoping for the modern Republican Party to wake up to this crisis and fix the damage done, forget it. Every solution to having trump subvert our foreign policy requires Republicans in Congress growing a collective spine they've never had before. Every solution to stopping Russian hacking into our electoral systems requires legislation and proactive efforts that undermine the Republicans' own efforts at suppressing voters they don't want (i.e. the ones who'll vote for Democrats).
Everything that Russia wants to do to break American democratic norms coincides nicely with Republican efforts to do the same thing. As a result, the Republican leadership may recoil at the optics of having trump sell this nation out to Putin, but they will not raise a goddamn finger to stop him.
The only solution right now is a mass voter uprising, where every Democrat and every Independent voter gathers together as one and vote the Republicans out of power. Granted, the GOP is trying every voter suppression trick in the books - removing registered voters from the rolls, forcing requirements to register that deny the right to vote from the poor the minorities and the youth, cutting back on precincts and early voting polls - but if voters overwhelm with a large turnout they can't stop that.
In the meantime, we are stuck with a traitor - there is NO OTHER WORD TO DESCRIBE trump RIGHT NOW - sitting in the White House, defaming our nation's intelligence agencies, selling us out to a foreign power in Putin's Russia that wants to turn us (and the rest of Europe) into their puppets, and desecrating every minute of every day the very Oath of Office - to DEFEND the United States - he is failing to uphold.
GODS HELP US WE ARE SO VERY ROYALLY FUCKED.
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