Re: "Psst... Rosenstein is a KGB Plant. Pass it on..."
 

You seem to think Rosenstein is some kind of a Saint, whose words on behalf of his boss should be sanctified and worshiped as Truth.

I think what we are all saying is something that should be patently obvious. He is a Republican operative making his career in a political field and his words should be taken with the same number of grains of salt as you'd take other operatives. His partisan attacks, likewise, should be treated as - SURPRISE! - partisan attacks. Especially when they are patently obvious.

So go ahead and worship Rosenstein all you want, but he's just a man, and you've had so many men before, in very many ways, he's just one more.

Re: "Psst... Rosenstein is a KGB Plant. Pass it on..."
 

I've never had a Reverse Irish Garden. It's my white whale, and I think Rod's the man for it.

Matt Yglesias
 

From the False Equivalence Desk:

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/sta...02932093095937

https://www.rollcall.com/news/opinio...rfect-tax-scam

Preemptive: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/roll-call/

Re: "Psst... Rosenstein is a KGB Plant. Pass it on..."
 

Pence is a liar. He would lie to protect Trump. Rosenstein is not a liar and would not lie or shade things to protect Barr as he has no good reason to do so. If a person were as honorable as you've portrayed Rosenstein, and he thought Barr had even slightly misrepresented Mueller, he'd never say what Rosenstein said to WSJ.

That's ducking the issue. Barr believes the President cannot be charged under unitary executive theory. Given that belief, regardless of DOJ policy, he should have stated that the President could not be charged based on unitary exec theory.

Congress will get to see Mueller's work. I agree a huge open issue is what gets redacted.

I am only as quick to argue exculpatory facts as you are to argue that Barr is guilty of misrepresentation. We're engaging in logically flawed arguments together or not, but there is no scenario under which, at this moment, knowing the facts we do, you can make a case against Barr that is valid while I cannot make a similarly valid case in his defense. Nor can you logically argue that Barr is culpable with any more validity than I can argue that most of the people who are accusing Barr of a "fix" or spin-doctoring are acting out of extreme Trump hatred. If you wish to invoke the rule that one may not suggest to know what's in another's head, it applies universally.

Re: Matt Yglesias
 

The reason a lot of people are convinced they got a tax increase is because a lot of people did. That doesn't mean "most" that means a lot. There are also people who ended up close to flush, and a lot of the tax "cuts" were pretty insignificant.

Certain provisions of the tax bill targeted specific types of taxpayers. If you live in a state with state income taxes and earn income mainly from services, you probably got a tax increase. If you are a single mother of moderate income, you probably got a tax increase. If you vote Democratic, you probably got a tax increase. If you are an independent in a blue state, you probably got a tax increase.

If you sit in a law office in Boston and compare taxes with people, it seems like most people got a tax increase. The stats tell me that wouldn't be true if I were in a real estate office in Alabama.

Re: Matt Yglesias
 

I think Yglesias was a little tongue in cheek, and he doesn't pretend to speak for progressives so it's certainly not an admission. The Roll Call piece is labeled as opinion, so your preemptive is beside the point. If you ask me, the bigger reason why people think their taxes were not cut is that the Administration changed the way withholding works so that people got their money in small amounts throughout the year, not in a refund at the end. Many people count on a tax refund to make big expenditures, and then it wasn't there, and they didn't realize they were getting it all along. That's a rare case where the Trump did something that is good for people but blew the communications strategy. Usually the opposite is true on both count.

Re: "Psst... Rosenstein is a KGB Plant. Pass it on..."
 

Again with the epistemological turgidity! You have no problem knowing what's in Pence's head!

No, the only issue is whether Congress (and the rest of us) get to see what Mueller found. Trump's DOJ was not going to indict him.

No kidding, Dick Tracy.

You don't seem to know any facts about what Mueller has found, so it's all hypothetical to you.

Re: Matt Yglesias
 

I agree with this. But I also don't at all fault the Democrats for counter-messaging effectively to the extent they may have done so.

It also highlights just how many dolts we have in this country. When I handled consumer debt portfolios we'd routinely get paid a bunch of money in March through June. It was because people received tax refunds. People were paying off delinquent debts which were adverse entries on their credit reports with refund money that, if they'd withheld properly all year, they could have used to stay current on the debts and not gone into default.

We need basic home economics classes to be put back into our school curricula.

Re: "Psst... Rosenstein is a KGB Plant. Pass it on..."
 

I feared I'd left that door open... But I can't help myself. I'll put this in the box Bill Maher uses for such pronouncements: "I don't know it for a fact... I just know it's true."

And you. (Well, we both know what Barr says Mueller found. What neither of us knows is whether Barr is or is not misrepresenting that.)

Re: "Psst... Rosenstein is a KGB Plant. Pass it on..."
 

You play this game of pretending you can't see into someone head when you want to defend them. You don't like Pence, so he's a liar. But CNN is biased for saying that Trump is lying when he is lying. And so on. It's super tired.

We know a lot about what Mueller has found, without Barr's letter, because he has prosecuted people and made many court filings. You choose to pretend that none of that is knowable.

Re: "Psst... Rosenstein is a KGB Plant. Pass it on..."
 

Oh, fuck... It's Pence. He's the worst.

And it's the same game you play. You just gave the benefit to Yglesias while infering the worst on the part of Barr.

It is tiring. When you do it here, and you do it all the time, it's tiring. It's also predictable.

Those findings undo Mueller's finding that Trump was not involved in a criminal conspiracy how? Shall we list the crimes to which these people plead guilty to demonstrate how little they refute Mueller's ultimate finding there was no conspiracy? Of course, if we do that, you'll pull the Pavlovian, "But Trump only escaped because Manafort and Stone refused to dime him out." Right.

Like I said, more predictable than the weather.

When this report comes out, if there's nothing terribly damaging in it, I wonder how long it will take you to start claiming the really bad stuff is in the redactions. I truly hope they release this thing with old school black bar redactions, in context of the original text, so that a reader can develop a sense of whether what was redacted was material or not. Otherwise, we risk this stupid guessing game - about which none of the public gives a shit except weirdos like us - going on forever.

Re: "Psst... Rosenstein is a KGB Plant. Pass it on..."
 

How did I give the benefit of anything to Yglesias? Are you dense? I said he was only partly right, but I think the actual way that the government gave money to people had more to do with whether they thought they were getting more or less money than anything that anyone said. Either way, Yglesias is not a progressive activist. He wasn't saying that he lied about anything, anymore than this was an admission. Jeebus.

That's not quite what Barr said. (E.g., see this.) Obviously, his effort to create a narrative worked, because you have swallowed it, hook, line and sinker, and are now regularly regurgitating it.

Re: "Psst... Rosenstein is a KGB Plant. Pass it on..."
 

Look, of course you've won, and beaten Sebby into a blathering pulse, but you do realize he likes that, don't you?

However, you've screwed up your metaphors. If you swallow something hook, line, and sinker*, you can't regurgitate it. That is what a hook is all about.

Hepfully,

Inter-Metaphor Consistency Enforcement (ICE)




* please use the Oxford comma.

Re: "Psst... Rosenstein is a KGB Plant. Pass it on..."
 

ETA: The metaphor joke does work. But in the spirit of analyzing things in the most cockeyed and paranoid manner, and shredding Occam’s Razor, as you’re doing with the Barr/Mueller situation, a person could swallow the hook, and if baited correctly, or gifted with a uniquely nimble throat, regurgitate it. But probably not often enough to qualify as regularly.

Re: "Psst... Rosenstein is a KGB Plant. Pass it on..."
 

I’m citing Barr’s words. If you’d like to put his exact words here, do so.

If you’d like me to reread a Rube Goldberg analysis (you previously cited this article... or someone else did), I’d say: You’ve already cost me those precious minutes. Give me them back first.

ETA: Fuck it. Here are Barr’s words:

The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Are you suggesting that Trump conspired with non-govt actors but, despite charging for every other incidental crime he found, Mueller gave Trump a pass because he was only looking for conspiracies with the Russian “Government”?

If that’s the argument, put on the Tin Foil Mitre.

ETA2: Or are you saying Mueller simply didn’t have enough to prove a conspiracy? Better part of 2 years, thousands of subpoenas, numerous cooperating witnesses, and hundreds of hours of interviews and god only knows how much intel from domestic and foreign sources, but still that mastermind, that cunning genius with so many years of political experience, Donald Trump, was just too damn clever for Mueller to catch?

Fashion yourself some tin foil pajamas.