[POLITICS] If Trump is Innocent, he should prove it

[Saelune]

Thoughts and Prayers don't stop bullets. If you were better than me, you would be mad at the shooter and those who encourage these shootings. Instead you're mad at me. I wonder why.

Trump has been proven guilty. It is now a matter of getting the government to follow its own laws. As a regular person, the US government is supposed to serve me, oh wait, that's a democracy, not a dictatorship, my bad.

Kavanaugh is a rapist still. He wasn't found innocent, he was never tried. Kavanaugh has not been found guilty by law or innocent by law. Republicans just said they were ok with an accused rapist representing them. Not the first, nor last time of that either. (Trump and Moore for example).

.
I'm not better than you. I am upset you're using this kind of language... It's irritating to hear 'Nazi' this and 'Nazi' that when it's unwarranted. You don't know if I'm mad at the shooter, or those that encourage him...'wonder why' you're using this kind of rhetoric instead. You're being passive-aggressive me, I'd prefer it if you were direct.

Trump hasn't been proven guilty, and it is not the duty of the executive to judge Trump, but the role of congress to impeach him and then have him put on trial... You're not living in a democracy. You've living in a representative republic, that's why the popular vote doesn't always win the presidential elections, and no amount of whinging would change that.

He isn't a rapist, he'd been accused of it by someone, and they both testified before a senate committee... The charges were found to be insufficient to block his nomination, with good cause. A case can be closed because of a lack of evidence, meaning that had it been to court the judge would have thrown the prosecution out because it had no case... We've had this tactic used here as well. Accuse the nominee of something, force him to withdraw his candidacy, and then when the case comes to trial - get thrown out of the court because you had no damn case to begin with. I suspect it's the same here.

I am upset that two synagogues got shot up. My 'language' is not the problem. It is 'irritating' that Nazis are still a problem in 2019 in the US.

You want direct? You care more about shaming me and defending Trump than addressing the real problems.

Trump has been proven not innocent via the Mueller report.

Glad we agree on something, that the US is not a Democracy. No really, I get tired of people arguing that a Republic is a Democracy when it is literally not. But I wish I was living in a Democracy.

Well, whether we know if he is guilty or not, he is what he is. But nothing he has done has suggested he isnt a rapist, since he had a flimsy defense, Ford had a solid one, and Kavanaugh is a little whiney *****. Either way, the Supreme Court is no place for a Shrodinger's Rapist. Either he is innocent, or he is unfit for duty.

But he was never formally tried. He should be though.

 

[Asita]

If you want me to stop telling you that you're uninformed, then it would do you well to actually demonstrate familiarity with the subject matter.

Are you now satisfied with my familiarity with the subject matter? Have I demonstrated to you that I wasn't just wasting large chunks of my time making things up without reading the source material? All you had to do was be specific, and I can specifically demonstrate how and why you're wrong.

I know this was the last part of your post but I'm going to respond to it first. It's an improvement, to be sure, but I am far from satisfied. In all frankness, you have an uphill battle in front of you because of how you presented yourself thus far. For starters, I have been being relatively specific in my claims, and it is only after I directly called you out on your apparent ignorance of the contents of the report and made it clear that I was not about to drop it that you decided to even address any specific claims of mine instead of trying to argue by way of lazy mischaracterization. In all frankness, you lost what remained of the benefit of the doubt several posts ago when in the span of two posts you proved unwilling to even check the surrounding context of as many quotes against your preconceptions about the case.

At this point it is far too easy to interpret that post as the first time you deigned to actually open the report at all, and that the reason you did so at all was simply to dispute the characterization that you were ignorant (ie, wounded pride). The pattern you have demonstrated feels far too similar to that of someone trying to write a report on a book that they have not read. As I said, at this point regaining the goodwill you lost in the course of this argument is an uphill battle.

That image above? That's a heat map of how Mueller characterized his findings.

"I should emphasize that the below [heat map] is my interpretation of the evidence as Mueller seems to provide it?others may have different readings."

-Quinta Jurecic, the Managing Editor of Lawfare

Quod erat demonstrandum. This actually very neatly illustrates my above point. Because once again, you looked for an easy out in the quoted material. But you did so by attempting to cast it as original research and left it at that, strongly implying an unfamiliarity with the underlying data the heat map was attempting to visualize. (For bonus points, you might recall that I criticized you for exactly this kind of thing in my prior post).

Before going further, I'm going to link a more recent release of the report. This is distinct from the prior one only in that the volumes are separated and the documents are searchable. I disclose this specifically because while my prior postings have been referencing the total page count between the two documents (as the version I was citing up to this point took the form of a single pdf), here I will be referencing the page counts for volume 2 rather than when the two volumes are treated as a single document. This also makes quoting it far simpler, as unlike the prior release, the contents can actually be copy-pasted rather than manually transcribed.

In the course of the report, it repeatedly takes a moment to summarize what it has laid out in analysis sections, wherein it divides the evidence into three categories: A) Obstructive Act, B) Nexus of a proceeding, and C) Intent. For example, the analysis of Comey's firing starts on page 74 (79 by the pdf?s count). In the segment of obstruction, the report doesn't come to an obvious conclusion, noting both that Trump's actions had the potential to affect a successor director's conduct of the investigation", but also that "the anticipated effect of removing the FBI director, however, would not necessarily be to prevent or impede the FBI from continuing its investigation". Hence the orange in the heat map. The evidence could support it but Mueller provides an alternate reading.

Then we get to the segment on Nexus, wherein Mueller simply lays out the evidence supporting that "a grand jury proceeding or criminal prosecution arising from an FBI investigation was objectively foreseeable and actually contemplated by the President when he terminated Comey". Unlike the former the report lays out no alternate readings, and very little ambiguity. Hence the red on the heat map.

And finally we get to the segment on Intent, wherein it lays out that "substantial evidence indicates that the catalyst for the President's decision to fire Corney was Corney's unwillingness to publicly state that the President was not personally under investigation, despite the President's repeated requests that Corney make such an announcement" before going into how the evidence suggested that some evidence indicated that "the President believed that the erroneous perception he was under investigation harmed his ability to manage domestic and foreign affairs, particularly in dealings with Russia" while more suggested "that the President wanted to protect himself from an investigation into his campaign", and that he had motive to try and put the Russia investigation behind him because "the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns". Hence again the red on the heat map.

So again, in trying to dismiss the heat map out of hand by implying it to be original research, you ended up strongly implying that you hadn't actually looked into the underlying data.

Regarding motive, Mueller recognizes as motive to interfere "includes concerns that continued investigation would call into question the legitimacy of his election and uncertainty about whether certain events - such as advance notice of WikiLeaks release of hacked information or the June 9, 2016 meeting between senior campaign officials and Russians - could be seen as criminal activity by the President, his campaign, or his family." (pg 369).

It's not motive I'm asking for. It's intent. I've got motive to rob a bank and run away with a million dollars, that does not mean I intend to. Everyone ever born has motive to not want 2 years of investigation into their lives, what I'm asking for is evidence of intent to interfere in the investigation.

To this, I can actually just refer you to the above. There's a specific subsection for intent in each of the analysis sections.

Pages 289-302 cover Trump's attempt to order McGahn to fire the Special Council (over which McGahn threatened to resign), and shows evidence that Trump knew that he "knew he should not have made those calls".

Pages 289-302 cover Trump's insistence that the Mueller had personal conflicts of interests that themselves would undermine the investigation. Apparently nobody but Trump took these claims seriously, and they're probably right not to, but to quote directly: "Call Rod, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can't be the special counsel."

That's the comment that's supposed to be obstruction of justice. Asking someone to inform Mueller's direct boss that Mueller should be replaced. That's right, be replaced. "Can't be the special counsel" logically implies that someone else would be the special counsel. The act that Trump's subordinate refused to take part in was having a different special counsel. Did this obstruct justice? Once again, no, because it never actually happened, and even if it did, it's not clear that firing Mueller would have impeded the investigation. The other question, did this intend to obstruct justice? How can you possibly assert that? Do you think that Donald Trump thinks so highly of Robert Mueller that any possible replacement would be less capable of finding Trump's dirty laundry? Do you think the stated intent, that Trump believed Mueller had a personal conflict with Trump, was just a front because Trump believed a different special counsel would be notably less competent? Reading intent to obstruct the investigation into "Call Rod, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can't be the special counsel" is borderline conspiracy theory.

A few pages later we see Trump trying to get McGahn to issue a statement and create a written record "for our records" claiming that Trump had not made the aforementioned directions (ie, fabricating evidence).

It's only fabricating evidence if the evidence is fabricated. Read the report. What did Trump tell McGahn to do? Call Rod Rosenstein to claim Mueller had conflicts of interests that should prevent him from being the special counsel. What did he tell McGahn to publicly deny? That he ordered McGahn to fire Mueller. Who did he ask him to make this statement to? The press that was reporting that Trump tried to order Mueller removed. Did Trump order McGahn to fire Mueller? The answer that lies somewhere between "no" and "technically no". He did not tell McGahn to make a false claim, he did not tell McGahn to lie to investigators, and Mueller notes evidence that Trump believes he was telling McGahn to tell the truth.

Apothecary, heal thyself.

The next day, on February 5, 2018, the President complained about the Times article to Porter. The President told Porter that the article was "bullshit" and he had not sought to terminate the Special Counsel. The President said that McGahn leaked to the media to make himself look good. The President then directed Porter to tell McGahn to create a record to make clear that the President never directed McGahn to fire the Special Counsel. Porter thought the matter should be handled by the White House communications office, but the President said he wanted McGahn to write a letter to the file "for our records" and wanted something beyond a press statement to demonstrate that the reporting was inaccurate. The President referred to McGahn as a "lying bastard" and said that he wanted a record from him. Porter recalled the President saying something to the effect of, "If he doesn't write a letter, then maybe I'll have to get rid of him.

Later that day, Porter spoke to McGahn to deliver the President's message. Porter told McGahn that he had to write a letter to dispute that he was ever ordered to terminate the Special Counsel. McGahn shrugged off the request, explaining that the media reports were true. McGahn told Porter that the President had been insistent on firing the Special Counsel and that McGahn had planned to resign rather than carry out the order, although he had not personally told the President he intended to quit. Porter told McGahn that the President suggested that McGahn would be fired if he did not write the letter. McGahn dismissed the threat, saying that the optics would be terrible if the President followed through with firing him on that basis. McGahn said he would not write the letter the President had requested. Porter said that to his knowledge the issue of McGahn's letter never came up with the President again, but Porter did recall telling Kelly about his conversation with McGahn.

Is there obstruction here. As always, of course not, because it never actually happened. Was there intent to obstruct justice? Only if you're willing to claim that the President asking a subordinate to make a PR statement on his behalf was intended to mislead the investigation. Do you really think Donald Trump's intention in getting a correction into a news story that makes him look better publicly (a correction he likely believed to be sufficiently truthful to print) was to obstruct the investigation? That's the claim you're making. The series of events is:

Trump-"Call Rod, Mueller has conflicts and can't be the special counsel."
McGahn-""No, I'm not doing that."
Nothing happens for a bit.
News Media-"Trump tried to fire Mueller! McGahn says so!"
Trump-"I never told you to fire Mueller."
McGahn-"Well, you said something that seemed to obviously imply that's what you wanted."
Trump-"But I never said to fire him, you should have them correct that story so it doesn't make me look bad."
McGahn-"Well, I'm not going to do that."
Trump-"Fine"

And you think that was intended to fabricate evidence for the investigation?

No, the intent of fabricating evidence is seen in directing McGahn to make a claim in writing that McGahn believed to be false, thereby naturally creating a conflict between the written record and any testimony McGahn might make that would thus make it easier to dismiss such testimony from McGahn.

Pages 118-120 (123-125 by the pdf's count)

As previously described, see Volume II, Section II.E, supra, substantial evidence supports McGahn's account that the President had directed him to have the Special Counsel removed, including the timing and context of the President's directive; the manner in which McGahn reacted; and the fact that the President had been told the conflicts were insubstantial, were being considered by the Department of Justice, and should be raised with the President' s personal counsel rather than brought to McGahn. In addition, the President's subsequent denials that he had told McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed were carefully worded. When first asked about the New York Times story, the President said, " Fake news, folks. Fake news. A typical New York Times fake story." And when the President spoke with McGahn in the Oval Office, he focused on whether he had used the word " fire," saying, "I never said to fire Mueller. I never said ' fire"' and " Did I say the word 'fire'?" The President's assertion in the Oval Office meeting that he had never directed McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed thus runs counter to the evidence.

In addition, even if the President sincerely disagreed with McGahn's memory of the June 17, 2017 events, the evidence indicates that the President knew by the time of the Oval Office meeting that McGahn' s account differed and that McGahn was firm in his views. Shortly after the story broke, the President's counsel told McGahn's counsel that the President wanted McGahn to make a statement denying he had been asked to fire the Special Counsel, but McGahn responded through his counsel that that aspect of the story was accurate and he therefore could not comply with the President' s request. The President then directed Sanders to tell McGahn to correct the story, but McGahn told her he would not do so because the story was accurate in reporting on the President's order . Consistent with that position, McGahn never issued a correction. More than a week later, the President brought up the issue again with Porter, made comments indicating the President thought McGahn had leaked the story, and directed Porter to have McGahn create a record denying that the President had tried to fire the Special Counsel. At that point, the President said he might " have to get rid of' McGahn if McGahn did not comply. McGahn again refused and told Porter, as he had told Sanders and as his counsel had told the President' s counsel, that the President had in fact ordered him to have Rosenstein remove the Special Counsel. That evidence indicates that by the time of the Oval Office meeting the President was aware that McGahn did not think the story was false and did not want to issue a statement or create a written record denying facts that McGahn believed to be true. The President nevertheless persisted and asked McGahn to repudiate facts that McGahn had repeatedly said were accurate.

Substantial evidence indicates that in repeatedly urging McGahn to dispute that he was ordered to have the Special Counsel terminated, the President acted for the purpose of influencing McGahn's account in order to deflect or prevent further scrutiny of the President's conduct towards the investigation. Several facts support that conclusion. The President made repeated attempts to get McGahn to change his story. As described above, by the time of the last attempt, the evidence suggests that the President had been told on multiple occasions that McGahn believed the President had ordered him to have the Special Counsel terminated. McGahn interpreted his encounter with the President in the Oval Office as an attempt to test his mettle and see how committed he was to his memory of what had occurred. The President had already laid the groundwork for pressing McGahn to alter his account by telling Porter that it might be necessary to fire McGahn if he did not deny the story, and Porter relayed that statement to McGahn. Additional evidence of the President's intent may be gleaned from the fact that his counsel was sufficiently alarmed by the prospect of the President's meeting with McGahn that he called McGahn' s counsel and said that McGahn could not resign no matter what happened in the Oval Office that day. The President's counsel was well aware of McGahn's resolve not to issue what he believed to be a false account of events despite the President's request. Finally, as noted above, the President brought up the Special Counsel investigation in his Oval Office meeting with McGahn and criticized him for telling this Office about the June 17, 2017 events. The President's statements reflect his understanding-and his displeasure-that those events would be part of an obstruction-of-justice.

That is markedly different than how you're trying to spin it. That's not "but I want to" "no", "ok..." A more accurate characterization goes thus:

T: "deny that statement"
M: "But that's not true"
T: "Deny it"
M: "No."
T: "Sanders, tell him he has to deny it."
S: "You have to deny it"
M: "No."
T: "Porter, tell him to deny it in writing or he's fired."
P: "He says he'll fire you if you don't write it 'for our records'"
M: "I'm not going to write a statement I know to be false. I'll quit before I do so."
Trump's Counsel: "Yeah, is this McGahn's Counsel? Please tell McGahn that no matter what happens in the office today, he can't resign."

That's not the innocent set of exchanges you so desperately want to paint them as.

 

[Marik2]

I'm just waiting for Donalds presidency to be over, so prosecutors can get to him quicker.

 

[tstorm823]

At this point it is far too easy to interpret that post as the first time you deigned to actually open the report at all, and that the reason you did so at all was simply to dispute the characterization that you were ignorant.

You can read it that way, sure. But you're going to have to explain how I've been correct about everything without reading it in the first place. Example A:

That image above? That's a heat map of how Mueller characterized his findings.

"I should emphasize that the below [heat map] is my interpretation of the evidence as Mueller seems to provide it?others may have different readings."

-Quinta Jurecic, the Managing Editor of Lawfare

Quod erat demonstrandum. This actually very neatly illustrates my above point. Because once again, you looked for an easy out in the quoted material.

I didn't look for an easy out. I knew it was there, because I read the piece the first time it was referenced here. And I had watched that youtube analysis before I saw it in this thread. And I had skimmed the report the afternoon if was released. I'm the one aware of what these things say, you're the one who faceplanted into it! Both the report itself and that analysis say upfront that there are alternate explanations and interpretations of basically everything, I just had to pick an instance to paste back to you.

Example B:

No, the intent of fabricating evidence is seen in directing McGahn to make a claim in writing that McGahn believed to be false, thereby naturally creating a conflict between the written record and any testimony McGahn might make that would thus make it easier to dismiss such testimony from McGahn.

That is markedly different than how you're trying to spin it. That's not "but I want to" "no", "ok..." A more accurate characterization goes thus:

T: "deny that statement"
M: "But that's not true"
T: "Deny it"
M: "No."
T: "Sanders, tell him he has to deny it."
S: "You have to deny it"
M: "No."
T: "Porter, tell him to deny it in writing or he's fired."
P: "He says he'll fire you if you don't write it 'for our records'"
M: "I'm not going to write a statement I know to be false. I'll quit before I do so."
Trump's Counsel: "Yeah, is this McGahn's Counsel? Please tell McGahn that no matter what happens in the office today, he can't resign."

That's not the innocent set of exchanges you so desperately want to paint them as.

Do you understand that at least in the technical sense, Trump was not ordering McGahn to lie? Trump did not tell McGahn to make a statement that Trump believed to be false. Why do you skip this part:

There is some evidence that at the time the New York Times and Washington Post stories were published in late January 2018, the President believed the stories were wrong and that he had never told McGahn to have Rosenstein remove the Special Counsel. The President correctly understood that McGahn had not told the President directly that he planned to resign. In addition, the President told Priebus and Porter that he had not sought to terminate the Special Counsel, and in the Oval Office meeting with McGahn , the President said, I never said to fire Mueller. I never said ' fire. 'That evidence could indicate that the President was not attempting to persuade McGahn to change his story but was instead offering his own-but different-recollection of the substance of is June 2017 conversations with McGahn and McGahn's reaction to them.

Both Trump and McGahn's accounts agree that Trump did not say "Fire Mueller". Both Trump and McGahn's accounts agree that McGahn did not tell the president he was considering resigning of it. The media reported that Trump had order McGahn to fire Mueller and McGahn had threatened to quit. And then Trump told McGahn to submit a correction to those news stories that were reporting something that Trump rightly believed were factually incorrect (at least technically).

Imagine for a moment that McGahn was blatantly lying to the press. Even better, pick your favorite president of all time and imagine a subordinate of there's was lying to the press. Perhaps claiming Abraham Lincoln had a illicit sex ring underneath a pizza shop. If Abraham Lincoln went to that subordinate and said "listen man, you gotta make an official statement that I don't have a sex ring under a pizza shop, it looks really bad that you said that," is your first assumption that Abraham Lincoln is telling him to do that to obstruct the investigation into his pizzeria sex ring? Probably not, because you don't hate Abraham Lincoln.

Once again, you believe Trump was trying to obstruct justice because your base assumption was that he was trying to obstruct justice. Did McGahn deny those media stories? No. Would it have obstructed the investigation if he had? Certainly not. McGahn had already been interviewed by Mueller's team before this happened, so he was on the record already, and it wouldn't cause any problems in testimony so long as he wasn't lying or contradicting himself. He could have done what Trump wanted by telling the Times "The president called me wanting me to help remove Mueller, but he never directly ordered me to fire him, and I didn't actually threaten him with my resignation, I only considered it." Which is to say, complying with Trump's order to deny the news stories would actually be to tell the truth.

"Trump told a subordinate to correct false reports about him! Obstruction!" That is a comically shaky charge, and that's as dark red as the heat map allows.

 

[Asita]

At this point it is far too easy to interpret that post as the first time you deigned to actually open the report at all, and that the reason you did so at all was simply to dispute the characterization that you were ignorant.

You can read it that way, sure. But you're going to have to explain how I've been correct about everything without reading it in the first place.

Except as best I can tell you haven't been right about much, if anything, thus far. Point of fact, most of your arguments have been entirely disconnected from the report itself, sometimes to the point of mischaracterizing it, repeatedly implying that the points we've been citing from it were our own conclusions rather than the results of the investigation, and several times now you appeared unfamiliar with the very paragraphs surrounding the few quotes you tried to dispute.

Example A:

That image above? That's a heat map of how Mueller characterized his findings.

"I should emphasize that the below [heat map] is my interpretation of the evidence as Mueller seems to provide it?others may have different readings."

-Quinta Jurecic, the Managing Editor of Lawfare

Quod erat demonstrandum. This actually very neatly illustrates my above point. Because once again, you looked for an easy out in the quoted material.

I didn't look for an easy out. I knew it was there, because I read the piece the first time it was referenced here. And I had watched that youtube analysis before I saw it in this thread. And I had skimmed the report the afternoon if was released. I'm the one aware of what these things say, you're the one who faceplanted into it! Both the report itself and that analysis say upfront that there are alternate explanations and interpretations of basically everything, I just had to pick an instance to paste back to you.

So you claim, but it's easy to make a claim regardless of its veracity and I believe your performance in this discussion thus far has given me sufficient reason to doubt your claim.

As an aside, it's also perhaps worth noting that this "example A" is both non sequitur to your intended point and doesn't actually have anything of substance to it. For starters, it didn't actually rebut anything. You just claimed that you did in fact have prior knowledge of the materials cited and then claimed it was your victory. Your claim of prior familiarity has not been well reflected in the argument up to now, nor is it something that we can actually verify. And it certainly has nothing to do with you "being right about everything" as you invoke it to illustrate.

Example B:

No, the intent of fabricating evidence is seen in directing McGahn to make a claim in writing that McGahn believed to be false, thereby naturally creating a conflict between the written record and any testimony McGahn might make that would thus make it easier to dismiss such testimony from McGahn.

That is markedly different than how you're trying to spin it. That's not "but I want to" "no", "ok..." A more accurate characterization goes thus:

T: "deny that statement"
M: "But that's not true"
T: "Deny it"
M: "No."
T: "Sanders, tell him he has to deny it."
S: "You have to deny it"
M: "No."
T: "Porter, tell him to deny it in writing or he's fired."
P: "He says he'll fire you if you don't write it 'for our records'"
M: "I'm not going to write a statement I know to be false. I'll quit before I do so."
Trump's Counsel: "Yeah, is this McGahn's Counsel? Please tell McGahn that no matter what happens in the office today, he can't resign."

That's not the innocent set of exchanges you so desperately want to paint them as.

Do you understand that at least in the technical sense, Trump was not ordering McGahn to lie? Trump did not tell McGahn to make a statement that Trump believed to be false.

Why do you skip this part:

There is some evidence that at the time the New York Times and Washington Post stories were published in late January 2018, the President believed the stories were wrong and that he had never told McGahn to have Rosenstein remove the Special Counsel. The President correctly understood that McGahn had not told the President directly that he planned to resign. In addition, the President told Priebus and Porter that he had not sought to terminate the Special Counsel, and in the Oval Office meeting with McGahn , the President said, I never said to fire Mueller. I never said ' fire. 'That evidence could indicate that the President was not attempting to persuade McGahn to change his story but was instead offering his own-but different-recollection of the substance of is June 2017 conversations with McGahn and McGahn's reaction to them.

Three reasons: the first being that in full context the report sets that up almost as a rhetorical device. What you quote is an opening statement that the rest of the segment casts doubt on. The statement bridging the gap between what you quote there and what I quoted was that "Other evidence cuts against that understanding of the President's conduct". Full quote, bolding the reasons behind my choice of quote:

a. Obstructive act. The President' s repeated efforts to get McGahn to create a record denying that the President had directed him to remove the Special Counsel would qualify as an obstructive act if it had the natural tendency to constrain McGahn from testifying truthfully or to undermine his credibility as a potential witness if he testified consistently with his memory, rather than with what the record said. There is some evidence that at the time the New York Times and Washington Post stories were published in late January 2018, the President believed the stories were wrong and that he had never told McGahn to have Rosenstein remove the Special Counsel. The President correctly understood that McGahn had not told the President directly that he planned to resign. In addition, the President told Priebus and Porter that he had not sought to terminate the Special Counsel, and in the Oval Office meeting with McGahn, the President said, "I never said to fire Mueller. I never said 'fire."' That evidence could indicate that the President was not attempting to persuade McGahn to change his story but was instead offering his own-but different-recollection of the substance of his June 2017 conversations with McGahn and McGahn' s reaction to them.

Other evidence cuts against that understanding of the President's conduct. As previously described, see Volume II, Section II.E, supra, substantial evidence supports McGahn's account that the President had directed him to have the Special Counsel removed, including the timing and context of the President's directive; the manner in which McGahn reacted; and the fact that the President had been told the conflicts were insubstantial, were being considered by the Department of Justice, and should be raised with the President' s personal counsel rather than brought to McGahn. In addition, the President's subsequent denials that he had told McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed were carefully worded. When first asked about the New York Times story, the President said, " Fake news, folks. Fake news. A typical New York Times fake story." And when the President spoke with McGahn in the Oval Office, he focused on whether he had used the word " fire," saying, "I never said to fire Mueller. I never said ' fire"' and " Did I say the word 'fire'?" The President's assertion in the Oval Office meeting that he had never directed McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed thus runs counter to the evidence.

In addition, even if the President sincerely disagreed with McGahn's memory of the June 17, 2017 events, the evidence indicates that the President knew by the time of the Oval Office meeting that McGahn' s account differed and that McGahn was firm in his views. Shortly after the story broke, the President's counsel told McGahn's counsel that the President wanted McGahn to make a statement denying he had been asked to fire the Special Counsel, but McGahn responded through his counsel that that aspect of the story was accurate and he therefore could not comply with the President' s request. The President then directed Sanders to tell McGahn to correct the story, but McGahn told her he would not do so because the story was accurate in reporting on the President's order . Consistent with that position, McGahn never issued a correction. More than a week later, the President brought up the issue again with Porter, made comments indicating the President thought McGahn had leaked the story, and directed Porter to have McGahn create a record denying that the President had tried to fire the Special Counsel. At that point, the President said he might " have to get rid of' McGahn if McGahn did not comply. McGahn again refused and told Porter, as he had told Sanders and as his counsel had told the President's counsel, that the President had in fact ordered him to have Rosenstein remove the Special Counsel. That evidence indicates that by the time of the Oval Office meeting the President was aware that McGahn did not think the story was false and did not want to issue a statement or create a written record denying facts that McGahn believed to be true. The President nevertheless persisted and asked McGahn to repudiate facts that McGahn had repeatedly said were accurate.

The second reason is that the way you've been arguing thus far gave me reason to suspect that including the whole obstruction segment would see you fixate on the first paragraph and dismiss the remainder of the segment, as you just did. Immediately after the paragraph you quoted, Mueller notes that evidence explicitly undermines the suggestion of the first paragraph. Furthermore, the segment concludes that, assuming for the sake of argument, even if it had started as a communication breakdown, Trump had persisted in the demands past a point where he certainly would have known that he was telling McGahn to write what he believed to be false testimony, at which point it qualifies as obstruction.

Third, the interpretation of it being a simple matter of "correcting the matter" is further undermined by the subsequent segments, with the Nexus segment noting that "if the President were focused solely on a press strategy in seeking to have McGahn refute the New York Times article, a nexus to a proceeding or to further investigative interviews would not be shown. But the President' s efforts to have McGahn write a letter "for our records" approximately ten days after the stories had come out-well past the typical time to issue a correction for a news story-indicates the President was not focused solely on a press strategy, but instead likely contemplated the ongoing investigation and any proceedings arising from it" and the segment on Intent pretty much spelling out Mueller's conclusions. "Substantial evidence indicates that in repeatedly urging McGahn to dispute that he was ordered to have the Special Counsel terminated, the President acted for the purpose of influencing McGahn's account in order to deflect or prevent further scrutiny of the President's conduct towards the investigation."

Once again, you believe Trump was trying to obstruct justice because your base assumption was that he was trying to obstruct justice.

No, I believe that Mueller found substantial evidence that Trump was trying to obstruct justice because I read the report and understood its findings of substantial evidence in support of that conclusion.

And while I'm getting increasingly frustrated that this discussion is devolving more and more into us making potshots against the other, "Probably not, because you don't hate Abraham Lincoln"? Really? You're going with the fallacy of appeal to motive? Please. I can just as easily argue blind loyalty or emotional investment in his innocence (sunk cost, perhaps) on your part and have just as much basis, maybe even more basis. It's a phenomenally unhelpful angle to argue, however, due to it removing the argument entirely from the facts of the debate and instead making snide insinuations about the nature of the participants.

 

[Agema]

I disagree on the matter of rent. The employer provides the environment for the employee, and the renter provides the housing for the renter - it is a service given, in exchange for a cost. There is an equilibrium that must be reached mutually between the two actors in a contract - one cannot overpower the other, but if they do it ends with the breakdown of the contract. Either the employer overpowers the employee (substitute owner and renter), in which case the employee leaves the unfair contract, or the employee overpowers the employer - in which case the employer tries to terminate the contract.

I think that's a very inaccurate comparison. Rent is significantly more problematic than that.

Employment is a process that is the basis of production, upon which the economy fundamentally rests. Rent often provides nothing at all in terms of production, more being the extraction of existing wealth from the have-nots by the haves. If you own a house and rent it out, and use the money to build up more property to rent out, it's not creating economically useful work to do and it's not investing in increased productivity. Even worse, it's potentially crowding out purchase, by which many would both pay for accomodation and build up their own assets.

Rent at some degree is healthy and necessary; people might just want one a car for a week, or a house for six months. But at some point rent also becomes an unhealthy process by which wealth is used to occupy ownership in order to gouge others. Classically, of course, the wealth of the medieval aristocracy was in large part that they granted themselves huge amounts of land and forced all the peasants to pay rent. Plenty of stuff like that goes on today.

These edge situations are often regarded with state intervention, while other means exist as well (such as voluntary worker's associations) to keep the relationship between employer and employee balanced. If you tip the balance in one way, the contract becomes unfavorable to one side and that side will try to terminate it. Sometimes it can't - in which case, the state has stepped in to mitigate the damage and obstruct injustice... You can't labor without the means of production. You can't live in a house without a house. Owning those things and providing them, for a cost, to those that don't have them, is regarded as a different class than other people. How do you call them, the have's and the have-not's? The mobility to move between the two groups has diminished over the years (as I have suggested earlier), but it had improved immensely since before the middle of the twentieth century. This, I am certain, can't be undisputed.

Indeed, social mobility is greater since the mid-20th century. But that cannot disguise the fact it has been in decline for the latter half of that 75-year period (testament in many ways to the huge steps made in the period of the 40s-70s).

I agree that there is no guarantee for a forward movement towards this cosmic 'justice' or as you put it better 'societal benefit'. We must ensure that our rights as people and citizens will not diminish under the pressure from would-be oligarchs. It has diminished in some sense over the years, which I've mentioned earlier, mostly due to the marriage between state and oligarchs to bail-out the other from near-bankruptcy. Had it not happened, many large firms would have gone under - cannibalized by smaller competitors or cut into pieces - and not what had happened in the past, which was the companies that received the grant-money from the state buying up the other failed companies that could not lobby their way into the hand-out list...

I mostly don't disagree here. I would suggest there is some utility (even necessity) for state intervention - a country might be strongly recommended to produce its own arms, for instance, and thus protect the relevant industries. The state may wish to promote economic growth with subsidies where private finance is insufficient, etc. Nevertheless, there is a point where capture of the state by industry can end up as unhealthy protectionism. But again, this is a lot about finding ways to insulate the state from excessive influence from oligarchs.

You can be one of those people if only you've spent less time here arguing over Roman and Iranian battle tactics and weapons... and complaining about rich people.

Ha ha. No.

How did Mark Zuckerberg become Mark Zuckerberg? Because it wasn't just being good at programming and working hard. Zuckerberg was lucky to get his "smart" genes. He had affluent parents, who looked after him well unlike millions of his peers. They sent him to a private college that could encourage him to excel in ways millions of his peers wouldn't experience. He got to Harvard, like almost no-one, where he was able to rub shoulders with and feed off dozens of bright young things, their ideas and drives (Zuckerberg probably got at least some of the idea for Facebook off his classmates), their social connections, where people at University of Anywhere wouldn't. And Zuckerberg's affluent background will of course have made it far easier for him to ditch his degree to devote to his nascent company, a security millions do not have. If Mark Zuckerberg's skill and passion were in chemistry, he'd probably be a professor or senior corporate researcher earning a nice but not spectacular middle class salary because it happened to not to be a boom industry. If he'd been born a few years earlier or a few years later, there's a fair chance Facebook would be nothing, because the tech wasn't ready or he wouldn't have met the right people or the gap in the market had alerady been filled.

That all said, I'm happy to give Zuckerberg his credit, because sure as hell he wouldn't have got there if he didn't have a lot of strengths and virtues, and he deserves success. The thing is, thousands, millions have the skills and put in the effort, and aren't billionaires or even close. I resent the "just world fallacy": moralising that fails to recognise that success is down to many factors outside individual control, and often used to damn the less affluent as if the fault of their moral failings - because that's what you just did to me there.

It really is not my fault I or anyone else here didn't have the benefits of upper class connections, happen to have interests and skills appropriate to money-making or political power, or just the dumb luck to have the that stuff in the right place and time.

I don't hate the rich, or object to people being rich. I object to the rich snaffling up ever larger slices of the pie, which denies resources important to the human development of the many, and which inevitably also ends up being used to subvert government policy to encourage even more national production to go to the rich.

 

[Agema]

I'm just waiting for Donalds presidency to be over, so prosecutors can get to him quicker.

"FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!"

I hope not of course. But with the advantage of being an incumbent, if the economy stays healthy, and bearing in mind how many Republicans have made it plain all his many failings in competence, morality and attitude don't matter (enough) to them, he's got a good shot.

By which time he'll be too old to ever meaningfully be held to account anyway.

 

[TheIronRuler]

I'm just waiting for Donalds presidency to be over, so prosecutors can get to him quicker.

"FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!"

I hope not of course. But with the advantage of being an incumbent, if the economy stays healthy, and bearing in mind how many Republicans have made it plain all his many failings in competence, morality and attitude don't matter (enough) to them, he's got a good shot.

By which time he'll be too old to ever meaningfully be held to account anyway.

.

.

I disagree on the matter of rent. The employer provides the environment for the employee, and the renter provides the housing for the renter - it is a service given, in exchange for a cost. There is an equilibrium that must be reached mutually between the two actors in a contract - one cannot overpower the other, but if they do it ends with the breakdown of the contract. Either the employer overpowers the employee (substitute owner and renter), in which case the employee leaves the unfair contract, or the employee overpowers the employer - in which case the employer tries to terminate the contract.

I think that's a very inaccurate comparison. Rent is significantly more problematic than that.

Employment is a process that is the basis of production, upon which the economy fundamentally rests. Rent often provides nothing at all in terms of production, more being the extraction of existing wealth from the have-nots by the haves. If you own a house and rent it out, and use the money to build up more property to rent out, it's not creating economically useful work to do and it's not investing in increased productivity. Even worse, it's potentially crowding out purchase, by which many would both pay for accomodation and build up their own assets.

Rent at some degree is healthy and necessary; people might just want one a car for a week, or a house for six months. But at some point rent also becomes an unhealthy process by which wealth is used to occupy ownership in order to gouge others. Classically, of course, the wealth of the medieval aristocracy was in large part that they granted themselves huge amounts of land and forced all the peasants to pay rent. Plenty of stuff like that goes on today.

These edge situations are often regarded with state intervention, while other means exist as well (such as voluntary worker's associations) to keep the relationship between employer and employee balanced. If you tip the balance in one way, the contract becomes unfavorable to one side and that side will try to terminate it. Sometimes it can't - in which case, the state has stepped in to mitigate the damage and obstruct injustice... You can't labor without the means of production. You can't live in a house without a house. Owning those things and providing them, for a cost, to those that don't have them, is regarded as a different class than other people. How do you call them, the have's and the have-not's? The mobility to move between the two groups has diminished over the years (as I have suggested earlier), but it had improved immensely since before the middle of the twentieth century. This, I am certain, can't be undisputed.

Indeed, social mobility is greater since the mid-20th century. But that cannot disguise the fact it has been in decline for the latter half of that 75-year period (testament in many ways to the huge steps made in the period of the 40s-70s).

I agree that there is no guarantee for a forward movement towards this cosmic 'justice' or as you put it better 'societal benefit'. We must ensure that our rights as people and citizens will not diminish under the pressure from would-be oligarchs. It has diminished in some sense over the years, which I've mentioned earlier, mostly due to the marriage between state and oligarchs to bail-out the other from near-bankruptcy. Had it not happened, many large firms would have gone under - cannibalized by smaller competitors or cut into pieces - and not what had happened in the past, which was the companies that received the grant-money from the state buying up the other failed companies that could not lobby their way into the hand-out list...

I mostly don't disagree here. I would suggest there is some utility (even necessity) for state intervention - a country might be strongly recommended to produce its own arms, for instance, and thus protect the relevant industries. The state may wish to promote economic growth with subsidies where private finance is insufficient, etc. Nevertheless, there is a point where capture of the state by industry can end up as unhealthy protectionism. But again, this is a lot about finding ways to insulate the state from excessive influence from oligarchs.

You can be one of those people if only you've spent less time here arguing over Roman and Iranian battle tactics and weapons... and complaining about rich people.

Ha ha. No.

How did Mark Zuckerberg become Mark Zuckerberg? Because it wasn't just being good at programming and working hard. Zuckerberg was lucky to get his "smart" genes. He had affluent parents, who looked after him well unlike millions of his peers. They sent him to a private college that could encourage him to excel in ways millions of his peers wouldn't experience. He got to Harvard, like almost no-one, where he was able to rub shoulders with and feed off dozens of bright young things, their ideas and drives (Zuckerberg probably got at least some of the idea for Facebook off his classmates), their social connections, where people at University of Anywhere wouldn't. And Zuckerberg's affluent background will of course have made it far easier for him to ditch his degree to devote to his nascent company, a security millions do not have. If Mark Zuckerberg's skill and passion were in chemistry, he'd probably be a professor or senior corporate researcher earning a nice but not spectacular middle class salary because it happened to not to be a boom industry. If he'd been born a few years earlier or a few years later, there's a fair chance Facebook would be nothing, because the tech wasn't ready or he wouldn't have met the right people or the gap in the market had alerady been filled.

That all said, I'm happy to give Zuckerberg his credit, because sure as hell he wouldn't have got there if he didn't have a lot of strengths and virtues, and he deserves success. The thing is, thousands, millions have the skills and put in the effort, and aren't billionaires or even close. I resent the "just world fallacy": moralising that fails to recognise that success is down to many factors outside individual control, and often used to damn the less affluent as if the fault of their moral failings - because that's what you just did to me there.

It really is not my fault I or anyone else here didn't have the benefits of upper class connections, happen to have interests and skills appropriate to money-making or political power, or just the dumb luck to have the that stuff in the right place and time.

I don't hate the rich, or object to people being rich. I object to the rich snaffling up ever larger slices of the pie, which denies resources important to the human development of the many, and which inevitably also ends up being used to subvert government policy to encourage even more national production to go to the rich.

.
Creating housing is a short-term employment - as are most construction jobs - which crop up when people invest in constructing office complexes, factory floors and housing... So building these also provides employment, if only for the duration it takes to construct them.

I see where you're coming from, but I disagree on rent being a means to extract wealth from the have-nots. I don't see it that way, but I understand why someone would.

 

[Agema]

I see where you're coming from, but I disagree on rent being a means to extract wealth from the have-nots. I don't see it that way, but I understand why someone would.

To be clear, I think rent is not always wealth extraction, but can easily end up being so.

In many cases, combining with an argument you have made, it is partly through the state in the form of "rent-seeking". Throughout the existence of the USA, for instance, copyright (which is a sort of rentable ownership) was progressively increased from 14 years, to 28 years, to 75 years (or life of creator +50), to 120 years (or life of author +75). Disney is often implicated as a major player in driving the last of those - but why does Disney need sole rights to profit from Mickey Mouse so long? The actual, productive creators are long dead - it's a load of other people squatting on it for no merit of their own. In many cases forms of subsidy and regulation can be rent-seeking; the intention being to block new entrants into the market.

Creating housing is a short-term employment - as are most construction jobs - which crop up when people invest in constructing office complexes, factory floors and housing... So building these also provides employment, if only for the duration it takes to construct them.

Building housing can of course alleviate rent. But landowners don't just own houses, they own the land it is on, and thus can exercise control over house-building. Obviously there can be motive to not build housing. If it costs $100k to build a house, why not keep supply limited and sell for $200k rather than expand supply, depress the market and sell the same house for $150k?

In many cases of course they don't even sell it: new builds are either rented or leased, so the owner can keep the core asset value of the property. And often of course to charge maintenance fees, where the landowner not only decides what work to undertake (potentially employing itself), but also charging the tenants / leaseholders for the privilege of administrating the process.

 

[TheIronRuler]

I see where you're coming from, but I disagree on rent being a means to extract wealth from the have-nots. I don't see it that way, but I understand why someone would.

To be clear, I think rent is not always wealth extraction, but can easily end up being so.

In many cases, combining with an argument you have made, it is partly through the state in the form of "rent-seeking". Throughout the existence of the USA, for instance, copyright (which is a sort of rentable ownership) was progressively increased from 14 years, to 28 years, to 75 years (or life of creator +50), to 120 years (or life of author +75). Disney is often implicated as a major player in driving the last of those - but why does Disney need sole rights to profit from Mickey Mouse so long? The actual, productive creators are long dead - it's a load of other people squatting on it for no merit of their own. In many cases forms of subsidy and regulation can be rent-seeking; the intention being to block new entrants into the market.

Creating housing is a short-term employment - as are most construction jobs - which crop up when people invest in constructing office complexes, factory floors and housing... So building these also provides employment, if only for the duration it takes to construct them.

Building housing can of course alleviate rent. But landowners don't just own houses, they own the land it is on, and thus can exercise control over house-building. Obviously there can be motive to not build housing. If it costs $100k to build a house, why not keep supply limited and sell for $200k rather than expand supply, depress the market and sell the same house for $150k?

In many cases of course they don't even sell it: new builds are either rented or leased, so the owner can keep the core asset value of the property. And often of course to charge maintenance fees, where the landowner not only decides what work to undertake (potentially employing itself), but also charging the tenants / leaseholders for the privilege of administrating the process.

.
I see it differently mostly because where I come from most of the land is owned by the state, and is leased out to entrepreneurs for purposes of construction, never sold. Therefore you can own an apartment complex, but the land it is built on is almost always owned by the state, and leased to you.

Its owners can 'sit' on their property, in this case land, and refuse to develop it to increase the productivity of their other nearby projects... However it's the antithesis to capitalism, and I object to it. You ought to continuously create, so that others can benefit from it, and increase the capital that is circulating, etc. ... That's the viewpoint of a capitalist entrepreneur.

If you've built something, and decided to rent it, it's the equivalent of starting a company, employing workers, etc. while when you build housing to sell them, it's the equivalent of starting a start-up company and selling it to others. The property is still being managed, only by its new owners and not the original owners. You can claim this renter-owner relationship doesn't produce anything of real value - which I can agree with - but it's still a valid option for property-owners and those that can't afford to settle-down in one area.

 

[Schadrach]

But nothing he has done has suggested he isnt a rapist,

I'm going to go out on a limb here and ask a crazy question: What *could* he have done that would have suggested he isn't a rapist?

since he had a flimsy defense, Ford had a solid one, and Kavanaugh is a little whiney *****. Either way, the Supreme Court is no place for a Shrodinger's Rapist. Either he is innocent, or he is unfit for duty.

Wait, Ford had a solid one? Ford's testimony was basically "I was at a party once 30 odd years ago. I don't remember when, I don't remember where, I don't remember how I got there, I don't remember how I got home. These other folks (who in turn released statements that they don't recall this party at all) were there. The only thing I remember clearly is that he tried to rape me in a room with this one other guy there, but I escaped because the other guy jumped on the bed."

I'll admit Kavanaugh's defense was kinda shitty, but were you expecting him to have 30-odd year old body cam footage of his every waking moment for the entire summer? That he could do *anything* more than deny it, and that the other people allegedly at the party deny that the party happened is more than I'd expect as a defense for a 30 year old case with no firm details in the accusation.

But he was never formally tried. He should be though.

He committed a state level offense, and would have to be tried in a state court. Which means he has to be investigated by state police, which requires a criminal complaint be filed. To date, Ford has not filed such a complaint. SCOTUS is not immune to state law and the president cannot pardon state crimes unless Gamble v US goes terribly wrong. Every time you bring this up I point this out.

If you want to see him subjected to an actual police investigation then Ford needs to file a complaint.

 

[tstorm823]

So you claim, but it's easy to make a claim regardless of its veracity and I believe your performance in this discussion thus far has given me sufficient reason to doubt your claim.

As an aside, it's also perhaps worth noting that this "example A" is both non sequitur to your intended point and doesn't actually have anything of substance to it. For starters, it didn't actually rebut anything. You just claimed that you did in fact have prior knowledge of the materials cited and then claimed it was your victory. Your claim of prior familiarity has not been well reflected in the argument up to now, nor is it something that we can actually verify. And it certainly has nothing to do with you "being right about everything" as you invoke it to illustrate.

It was an example (like the second example) of where I knew what the source materials said and you didn't. You said something that flatly contradicted your own source. I told you what you had contradicted. And you've taken this as evidence of my lack of familiarity with it. Reflect on yourself for a moment.

The second reason is that the way you've been arguing thus far gave me reason to suspect that including the whole obstruction segment would see you fixate on the first paragraph and dismiss the remainder of the segment, as you just did.

So in order to avoid me dismissing half the section, you actively dimissed half the section. Reflect on yourself for a moment.

Immediately after the paragraph you quoted, Mueller notes that evidence explicitly undermines the suggestion of the first paragraph. Furthermore, the segment concludes that, assuming for the sake of argument, even if it had started as a communication breakdown, Trump had persisted in the demands past a point where he certainly would have known that he was telling McGahn to write what he believed to be false testimony, at which point it qualifies as obstruction.

Quite the opposite. McGahn admits that Trump was asking him to make a true statement. McGahn's account agrees that Trump never told him to fire Mueller, McGahn agrees that he never threatened Trump with his resignation, but he decided for himself that the implications of those reports were more important that factual accuracy, that they were correct in reporting that Trump wanted Mueller removed even if the details weren't perfect.

You and Mueller are positing worries of how a correction to the press would impact McGahn's testimony. Imagine for a moment you brought this exact point to trial as is. You claimed Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice because he attempted to make McGahn fire Mueller. And your key witness is obviously McGahn. So you put him on the stand, and Trump's attorney's cross examine.

Defense: Did Mr Trump order you to fire Mueller.
McGahn: Yes.
Defense: I'd like to remind you of your previous statements to investigators that what had actually occurred was that Mr Trump asked you to call Rod Rosenstein to say Mueller had conflicts of interest that should disqualify him from the investigation. And you have physical notes documenting this exchange. Is this accurate?
McGahn: Yes.
Defense: So Trump never told you to fire Mueller.
McGahn: I understood it as him wanting me to fire Mueller.
Defense: But he never did order you to fire Mueller.
McGahn: Not in those words, no.
Defense: And also, you did not tell the president that you intended to resign after that phone call, correct.
McGahn: I did intend to.
Defense: But you did not express that to Mr. Trump.
McGahn: No.
Defense: So when the New York Times reported that the President had ordered you to fire Mueller and you threatened to resign because of it, why didn't you correct them?

Hey look! Now his testimony has been fatally compromised by him not correcting the record. McGahn both told the investigators a recounting of events that contradicted the news stories and insisted to everyone involved that those news stories were accurate. And his testimony is the totality of the evidence for that case. Correcting the media would not have compromised their case. Not correcting the media might have though.

But the President' s efforts to have McGahn write a letter "for our records" approximately ten days after the stories had come out-well past the typical time to issue a correction for a news story-indicates the President was not focused solely on a press strategy.

This isn't your fault. This is an outrageously idiotic assertion by Mueller. The news of this didn't just happen on January 25th and then disappear. Here [https://www.businessinsider.com/timeline-of-obstruction-of-justice-events-in-trump-russia-investigation-2018-1] is one of countless articles from 8-10 days after the New York Times article that directly reference that report as a source to say Trump tried to fire Mueller. It took time for that report to transform from a rumor based on anonymous sources to a widely accepted truth. The Trump news cycle is atypical and erratic. Need I remind you that it's been reported that Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on a bed because Obama had slept there. The 10 day window is in no way indicative that Trump wasn't actually concerned about the news report. That suggestion is dumb and Mueller should feel stupid and ashamed for making it.

It's a phenomenally unhelpful angle to argue, however, due to it removing the argument entirely from the facts of the debate and instead making snide insinuations about the nature of the participants.

I disagree. I think it is nearly always more useful to abstract an argument to its principles by way of analogy than it is to pretend a singular case is incomparable to anything else. If the principles of your argument cannot be abstracted, you're just making ad hoc nonsense arguments. To be clear, I don't believe you're doing that, I just think you have no reason to resist analogies.

Well, whether we know if he is guilty or not, he is what he is. But nothing he has done has suggested he isnt a rapist, since he had a flimsy defense, Ford had a solid one, and Kavanaugh is a little whiney *****. Either way, the Supreme Court is no place for a Shrodinger's Rapist. Either he is innocent, or he is unfit for duty.

But he was never formally tried. He should be though.

You should think Kavanaugh is innocent. I believe Dr. Ford in her most credible claims. As illustrated by Micheal Avenatti inventing a rape victim, claims go down in credibility once they can be influenced by the political and media circus. I ask you to believe Ford in her first documented recounting of the incident, when she was speaking to just her husband and a therapist. At that time, she said she was assaulted at a party by boys should could not name in the mid-80s, and I believe that. The only issue with this story is that Kavanaugh graduated before the mid-80s, but other than that it answers all the outlying questions: why did none of the possible witnesses corroborate her claim? Because they weren't there, because they had also graduated. Why can't she explain how she got home? Because she drove herself home, but she can't have driven herself home without a license, and she didn't have a license until the mid-80s. The way to believe her with the least contradictions is to say "she was assaulted by boys at a high school party near the end of her high school career and then accidentally misidentified who the assailant was 30 years later." To believe that Kavanaugh assaulted her, you have to believe that she misremembered when telling the therapist, that she can't remember what extraordinary means got her home, and that everyone else involved with the night of the incident is lying.

 

[Saelune]

But nothing he has done has suggested he isnt a rapist,

I'm going to go out on a limb here and ask a crazy question: What *could* he have done that would have suggested he isn't a rapist?

since he had a flimsy defense, Ford had a solid one, and Kavanaugh is a little whiney *****. Either way, the Supreme Court is no place for a Shrodinger's Rapist. Either he is innocent, or he is unfit for duty.

Wait, Ford had a solid one? Ford's testimony was basically "I was at a party once 30 odd years ago. I don't remember when, I don't remember where, I don't remember how I got there, I don't remember how I got home. These other folks (who in turn released statements that they don't recall this party at all) were there. The only thing I remember clearly is that he tried to rape me in a room with this one other guy there, but I escaped because the other guy jumped on the bed."

I'll admit Kavanaugh's defense was kinda shitty, but were you expecting him to have 30-odd year old body cam footage of his every waking moment for the entire summer? That he could do *anything* more than deny it, and that the other people allegedly at the party deny that the party happened is more than I'd expect as a defense for a 30 year old case with no firm details in the accusation.

But he was never formally tried. He should be though.

He committed a state level offense, and would have to be tried in a state court. Which means he has to be investigated by state police, which requires a criminal complaint be filed. To date, Ford has not filed such a complaint. SCOTUS is not immune to state law and the president cannot pardon state crimes unless Gamble v US goes terribly wrong. Every time you bring this up I point this out.

If you want to see him subjected to an actual police investigation then Ford needs to file a complaint.

The guy is a judge, not some random dude. He for one, should have acted like it. Instead he cries like a little *****, babbling about liking beer and letting us know that this dude was a frat guy with frat friends.

Ford was calm, composed, and willing to endure death threats and attacks by the Republican party for the sake of justice.

Oh and I am also not under any sort of delusion that rape and sexism against women isn't a huge problem.

Kavanaugh's testimony was 'I like beer'. If you think Ford's testimony is un-credible, then why do you believe Kavanaugh?

You will admit his defense was kinda shitty, but defend him, while calling Ford's defense kinda shitty and thus not believing her?

The guy was accused of rape and we had a whole hearing about his job relating to it. If that doesn't lead to a criminal investigation, then that is a problem. The law and the government are corrupt and inept, stop hiding behind it as if everything actually just 'works' for the sake of justice. It doesn't.

 

[Saelune]

You should think Kavanaugh is innocent. I believe Dr. Ford in her most credible claims. As illustrated by Micheal Avenatti inventing a rape victim, claims go down in credibility once they can be influenced by the political and media circus. I ask you to believe Ford in her first documented recounting of the incident, when she was speaking to just her husband and a therapist. At that time, she said she was assaulted at a party by boys should could not name in the mid-80s, and I believe that. The only issue with this story is that Kavanaugh graduated before the mid-80s, but other than that it answers all the outlying questions: why did none of the possible witnesses corroborate her claim? Because they weren't there, because they had also graduated. Why can't she explain how she got home? Because she drove herself home, but she can't have driven herself home without a license, and she didn't have a license until the mid-80s. The way to believe her with the least contradictions is to say "she was assaulted by boys at a high school party near the end of her high school career and then accidentally misidentified who the assailant was 30 years later." To believe that Kavanaugh assaulted her, you have to believe that she misremembered when telling the therapist, that she can't remember what extraordinary means got her home, and that everyone else involved with the night of the incident is lying.

Kavanaugh doesn't remember, why believe him?

 

[tstorm823]

You should think Kavanaugh is innocent. I believe Dr. Ford in her most credible claims. As illustrated by Micheal Avenatti inventing a rape victim, claims go down in credibility once they can be influenced by the political and media circus. I ask you to believe Ford in her first documented recounting of the incident, when she was speaking to just her husband and a therapist. At that time, she said she was assaulted at a party by boys should could not name in the mid-80s, and I believe that. The only issue with this story is that Kavanaugh graduated before the mid-80s, but other than that it answers all the outlying questions: why did none of the possible witnesses corroborate her claim? Because they weren't there, because they had also graduated. Why can't she explain how she got home? Because she drove herself home, but she can't have driven herself home without a license, and she didn't have a license until the mid-80s. The way to believe her with the least contradictions is to say "she was assaulted by boys at a high school party near the end of her high school career and then accidentally misidentified who the assailant was 30 years later." To believe that Kavanaugh assaulted her, you have to believe that she misremembered when telling the therapist, that she can't remember what extraordinary means got her home, and that everyone else involved with the night of the incident is lying.

Kavanaugh doesn't remember, why believe him?

Read my paragraph again. I never asked you to believe a word Kavanaugh said. I asked you to believe what Dr. Christine Blasey Ford told her therapist rather than what she told to her Congresswoman.

 

[Asita]

So you claim, but it's easy to make a claim regardless of its veracity and I believe your performance in this discussion thus far has given me sufficient reason to doubt your claim.

As an aside, it's also perhaps worth noting that this "example A" is both non sequitur to your intended point and doesn't actually have anything of substance to it. For starters, it didn't actually rebut anything. You just claimed that you did in fact have prior knowledge of the materials cited and then claimed it was your victory. Your claim of prior familiarity has not been well reflected in the argument up to now, nor is it something that we can actually verify. And it certainly has nothing to do with you "being right about everything" as you invoke it to illustrate.

It was an example (like the second example) of where I knew what the source materials said and you didn't. You said something that flatly contradicted your own source. I told you what you had contradicted. And you've taken this as evidence of my lack of familiarity with it. Reflect on yourself for a moment.

Except that's not actually what happened, and what you did was closer to quote mining than anything else. Let's review, shall we? I say that the infographic "is a heat map of how Mueller characterized his findings". Approximate meaning being that it is reflective of what is seen in Mueller's report. You attempt to rebut that with the simple quote from the page saying that the image is the writer's "interpretation of the evidence as Mueller seems to provide it-others may have different readings", and leave it at that as if it actually contradicts the intended point. About the only way that that makes sense as an attempted rebuttal is if you either mistook me to mean that it was a heat map provided by the report, or if you were trying to claim that the infographic's illustration was wildly different from what was indicated in the report, or otherwise not soundly based in it. I then go on to explain how it is reflective, using the report's analysis of Comey's firing for illustrative purposes.

All of which you dismiss out of hand in favor of claiming that the disclaimer you cited somehow definitively proved both that you "knew what the source materials said and {I} didn't"? At worst you could say that I should have said "a heat map of Mueller's findings" rather than "how Mueller characterized his findings", and there'd be some validity to that, but that's ultimately a minor criticism that sidesteps the core issue of what the infographic illustrates about the report's findings.

The second reason is that the way you've been arguing thus far gave me reason to suspect that including the whole obstruction segment would see you fixate on the first paragraph and dismiss the remainder of the segment, as you just did.

So in order to avoid me dismissing half the section, you actively dimissed half the section. Reflect on yourself for a moment.

Once again, apothecary heal thyself. I supplied three reasons that I explained at length, if you'll recall. The first being that in the context of the report it's set up almost as a rhetorical device (as aptly summed up near the end of the first paragraph in what I quoted: "The President's assertion in the Oval Office meeting that he had never directed McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed thus runs counter to the evidence" that was set up in the paragraph you're criticizing me for excluding.) The second, as you quote here, was that I was reasonably certain that you'd fixate on that to the exclusion of the whole (ie, in light of points one and three, it would end up being little more than a distraction). And the third being that the later segments (Nexus and Intent) further cemented the status of the paragraph in question as not reflective of their conclusions.

Point of fact, in the post you're now responding to I had even included the whole of the Obstruction segment, bolding the key statements that led me to the decision, and quoted similar lines from the Nexus and Intent segments.

And you want to try to spin the whole of my reasoning being simple out of hand dismissal on my part, based entirely on the second of my three stated reasons, as if the first and third did not exist? And you're doing this in a text based conversation, wherein our responses are written down within a few on-screen inches of what we are responding to?

You and Mueller are positing worries of how a correction to the press would impact McGahn's testimony. Imagine for a moment you brought this exact point to trial as is. You claimed Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice because he attempted to make McGahn fire Mueller. And your key witness is obviously McGahn. So you put him on the stand, and Trump's attorney's cross examine.

Defense: Did Mr Trump order you to fire Mueller.
McGahn: Yes.
Defense: I'd like to remind you of your previous statements to investigators that what had actually occurred was that Mr Trump asked you to call Rod Rosenstein to say Mueller had conflicts of interest that should disqualify him from the investigation. And you have physical notes documenting this exchange. Is this accurate?
McGahn: Yes.
Defense: So Trump never told you to fire Mueller.
McGahn: I understood it as him wanting me to fire Mueller.
Defense: But he never did order you to fire Mueller.
McGahn: Not in those words, no.
Defense: And also, you did not tell the president that you intended to resign after that phone call, correct.
McGahn: I did intend to.
Defense: But you did not express that to Mr. Trump.
McGahn: No.
Defense: So when the New York Times reported that the President had ordered you to fire Mueller and you threatened to resign because of it, why didn't you correct them?

Hey look! Now his testimony has been fatally compromised by him not correcting the record. McGahn both told the investigators a recounting of events that contradicted the news stories and insisted to everyone involved that those news stories were accurate. And his testimony is the totality of the evidence for that case. Correcting the media would not have compromised their case. Not correcting the media might have though.

To match your tone: Hey look! The report actually addresses this! Towards the "did he say fire" bit:

A threshold question is whether the President in fact directed McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed. After news organizations reported that in June 2017 the President had ordered McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed, the President publicly disputed these accounts, and privately told McGahn that he had simply wanted McGahn to bring conflicts of interest to the Department of Justice' s attention. See Volume II, Section II.I, infra. Some of the President's specific language that McGahn recalled from the calls is consistent with that explanation. Substantial evidence, however, supports the conclusion that the President went further and in fact directed McGahn to call Rosenstein to have the Special Counsel removed.

First, McGahn' s clear recollection was that the President directed him to tell Rosenstein not only that conflicts existed but also that "Mueller has to go." McGahn is a credible witness with no motive to lie or exaggerate given the position he held in the White House. McGahn spoke with the President twice and understood the directive the same way both times, making it unlikely that he misheard or misinterpreted the President's request. In response to that request, McGahn decided to quit because he did not want to participate in events that he described as akin to the Saturday Night Massacre. He called his lawyer, drove to the White House, packed up his office, prepared to submit a resignation letter with his chief of staff, told Priebus that the President had asked him to "do crazy shit," and informed Priebus and Bannon that he was leaving. Those acts would be a highly unusual reaction to a request to convey information to the Department of Justice.

Second, in the days before the calls to McGahn, the President, through his counsel, had already brought the asserted conflicts to the attention of the Department of Justice. Accordingly, the President had no reason to have McGahn call Rosenstein that weekend to raise conflicts issues that already had been raised. Third, the President' s sense of urgency and repeated requests to McGahn to take immediate action on a weekend-" You gotta do this. You gotta call Rod."-suppot McGahn's recollection that the President wanted the Department of Justice to take action to remove the Special Counsel. Had the President instead sought only to have the Department of Justice re-examine asserted conflicts to evaluate whether they posed an ethical bar, it would have been unnecessary to set the process in motion on a Saturday and to make repeated calls to McGahn. Finally, the President had discussed "knocking out Mueller" and raised conflicts of interest in a May 23, 2017 call with McGahn, reflecting that the President connected the conflicts to a plan to remove the Special Counsel. And in the days leading up to June 17, 2017, the President made clear to Priebus and Bannon, who then told Ruddy, that the President was considering terminating the Special Counsel. Also during this time period, the President reached out to Christie to get his thoughts on firing the Special Counsel. This evidence shows that the President was not just seeking an examination of whether conflicts existed but instead was looking to use asserted conflicts as a way to terminate the Special Counsel.

Regarding the "did you tell Trump you were quitting bit" that's actually irrelevant, as the meat of the story is that Trump wanted McGahn to "correct" was that Trump wanted Mueller removed. Mueller would later draw attention to the specificity of the wording, with Trump carefully asking whether he'd said the word "fire". And tying that in with the "why didn't you issue a correction" bit:

Shortly after the story broke, the President's counsel told McGahn's counsel that the President wanted McGahn to make a statement denying he had been asked to fire the Special Counsel, but McGahn responded through his counsel that that aspect of the story was accurate and he therefore could not comply with the President's request. The President then directed Sanders to tell McGahn to correct the story, but McGahn told her he would not do so because the story was accurate in reporting on the President's order . Consistent with that position, McGahn never issued a correction. More than a week later, the President brought up the issue again with Porter, made comments indicating the President thought McGahn had leaked the story, and directed Porter to have McGahn create a record denying that the President had tried to fire the Special Counsel. At that point, the President said he might " have to get rid of' McGahn if McGahn did not comply. McGahn again refused and told Porter, as he had told Sanders and as his counsel had told the President' s counsel, that the President had in fact ordered him to have Rosenstein remove the Special Counsel.

But the President' s efforts to have McGahn write a letter "for our records" approximately ten days after the stories had come out-well past the typical time to issue a correction for a news story-indicates the President was not focused solely on a press strategy.

This isn't your fault. This is an outrageously idiotic assertion by Mueller. The news of this didn't just happen on January 25th and then disappear. Here [https://www.businessinsider.com/timeline-of-obstruction-of-justice-events-in-trump-russia-investigation-2018-1] is one of countless articles from 8-10 days after the New York Times article that directly reference that report as a source to say Trump tried to fire Mueller. It took time for that report to transform from a rumor based on anonymous sources to a widely accepted truth. The Trump news cycle is atypical and erratic. Need I remind you that it's been reported that Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on a bed because Obama had slept there. The 10 day window is in no way indicative that Trump wasn't actually concerned about the news report. That suggestion is dumb and Mueller should feel stupid and ashamed for making it.

It would be if it was the sole basis for the conclusion. This would be circumstantial evidence used to corroborate other evidence, not the core of the evidence itself.

It's a phenomenally unhelpful angle to argue, however, due to it removing the argument entirely from the facts of the debate and instead making snide insinuations about the nature of the participants.

I disagree. I think it is nearly always more useful to abstract an argument to its principles by way of analogy than it is to pretend a singular case is incomparable to anything else. If the principles of your argument cannot be abstracted, you're just making ad hoc nonsense arguments. To be clear, I don't believe you're doing that, I just think you have no reason to resist analogies.

...did you perhaps mean to respond to something else here? Because let me remind you that the quote you are responding to was about using the appeal to motive, not analogy. Full quote:

And while I'm getting increasingly frustrated that this discussion is devolving more and more into us making potshots against the other, "Probably not, because you don't hate Abraham Lincoln"? Really? You're going with the fallacy of appeal to motive? Please. I can just as easily argue blind loyalty or emotional investment in his innocence (sunk cost, perhaps) on your part and have just as much basis, maybe even more basis. It's a phenomenally unhelpful angle to argue, however, due to it removing the argument entirely from the facts of the debate and instead making snide insinuations about the nature of the participants.

I'm honestly at a loss as to how you could have validly interpreted that as railing against the use of analogy rather than against challenging an argument by calling into question the motives of the person arguing the point.

 

[Schadrach]

The guy is a judge, not some random dude. He for one, should have acted like it. Instead he cries like a little *****, babbling about liking beer and letting us know that this dude was a frat guy with frat friends.

So to be clear, he's guilty because he lacked decorum when accused publicly of a serious crime, specifically in an attempt to harm his career for political reasons? Remember, being emotional means you're guilty of whatever you've been accused of, but remember men should express emotion especially in difficult situations. At least I keep getting told that nothing so is toxic masculinity.

Ford was calm, composed, and willing to endure death threats and attacks by the Republican party for the sake of justice.

You don't find it odd in the least that she could endure all that but never made a complaint to the relevant police (she still can, mind you)? That the moment it no longer had explicit political value she basically vanished? At the same time, I wouldn't worry much about her well being -- the $800k in crowdfunding can afford a fair bit of personal security.

Kavanaugh's testimony was 'I like beer'. If you think Ford's testimony is un-credible, then why do you believe Kavanaugh?

I don't really have to believe Kavanaugh. I don't even have to believe his old calendar. Not being guilty is the default position, and there are enough issues with Ford's testimony to sow doubt and that is all that is required. Not least of which being that the only real details in her testimony were that he tried to rape her, the other guy jumped on the bed which allowed her to escape, and the names of some other folks allegedly at the party where this happened. Those other people released statements that they don't recall such a party at all.

You will admit his defense was kinda shitty, but defend him, while calling Ford's defense kinda shitty and thus not believing her?

On one side you have "he raped me at a party that happened somewhere sometime that year and that I don't know how I got to or from, and these other people were there."

On the other side you have "Here's a calendar of what I was doing back then, I was a drunken party boy back then who did lots of questionable things back then (none of which were rape)." and the other people who were allegedly at the party not recalling such a party.

So, I'm doubting Ford because she has a lack of useful details and innocence is the default position. You're doubting Kavanuagh, Mark Judge, Patrick J. Smyth and Leland Ingham Keyser (three people she named as being at the party). Judge stated "I have no memory of this alleged incident," "do not recall the party" and "never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes." Smith that "I have no knowledge of the party in question." Keyser (who was also Ford's friend and thus the least likely to perjure herself to protect her rapist) stated she "does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, without, Dr. Ford."

If that doesn't lead to a criminal investigation, then that is a problem.

Why you're right, any time someone makes a public accusation that gets media attention the police should start investigating immediately. Fuck procedure and process, those just get in the way of punishing the guilty, which we know are guilty because they were accused and can't definitively prove they didn't do something 30 years ago!

Again, if she wanted an actual police investigation, all she has to do is actually make a criminal complaint. The governor of that state actually tried to compel the police to open an investigation, and the police refused because he doesn't have the power to because, how can I put this, giving the executive branch the power to demand criminal investigations against individuals is a dangerous road to go down.

 

[tstorm823]

Except that's not actually what happened, and what you did was closer to quote mining than anything else. Let's review, shall we? I say that the infographic "is a heat map of how Mueller characterized his findings". Approximate meaning being that it is reflective of what is seen in Mueller's report. You attempt to rebut that with the simple quote from the page saying that the image is the writer's "interpretation of the evidence as Mueller seems to provide it-others may have different readings", and leave it at that as if it actually contradicts the intended point. About the only way that that makes sense as an attempted rebuttal is if you either mistook me to mean that it was a heat map provided by the report, or if you were trying to claim that the infographic's illustration was wildly different from what was indicated in the report, or otherwise not soundly based in it. I then go on to explain how it is reflective, using the report's analysis of Comey's firing for illustrative purposes.

Excuse me? No thank you. You said this:

No, the problem is that you're being obtuse and more than a little disingenuous. You've repeatedly implied that this conversation is about my own (and now "lawfareblog"'s) original research, rather than what we are summarizing from the Mueller report. This is not amateur sleuthing made by people with a questionable understanding of the law. They are summarizations of the official investigation led by a former FBI Director. That image above? That's a heat map of how Mueller characterized his findings.

If you managed to explain anything the way you think you did, we'd be in a different position. You didn't do that. You appealed to the authority of a heat map and are now mad at me that the heat map came with a "my opinion has no authority" disclaimer.

Regarding the "did you tell Trump you were quitting bit" that's actually irrelevant, as the meat of the story is that Trump wanted McGahn to "correct" was that Trump wanted Mueller removed.

So you're saying Donald Trump, who by this point had made official motions to have Robert Mueller removed as special counsel due to perceived personal conflicts of interest, was trying to have McGahn correct the record to hide that he wanted Mueller removed as special counsel? The man who tweeted publicly untold times about how the investigation itself was a witch hunt was trying to pretend he wanted Mueller to be the special counsel. That's your theory?That's supposed to be more plausible than "Trump thought the stories were untrue and worthy of correction."

I'm honestly at a loss as to how you could have validly interpreted that as railing against the use of analogy rather than against challenging an argument by calling into question the motives of the person arguing the point.

Because you ignored an analogy meant to illustrate that asking someone to correct a news story isn't inherently obstruction of justice with a paragraph about removing the argument from the facts of the debate and making it a personal attack. If you have no problem with the analogy, you should probably acknowledge it.

 

[Agema]

I see it differently mostly because where I come from most of the land is owned by the state, and is leased out to entrepreneurs for purposes of construction, never sold. Therefore you can own an apartment complex, but the land it is built on is almost always owned by the state, and leased to you.

Its owners can 'sit' on their property, in this case land, and refuse to develop it to increase the productivity of their other nearby projects... However it's the antithesis to capitalism, and I object to it. You ought to continuously create, so that others can benefit from it, and increase the capital that is circulating, etc. ... That's the viewpoint of a capitalist entrepreneur.

If you've built something, and decided to rent it, it's the equivalent of starting a company, employing workers, etc. while when you build housing to sell them, it's the equivalent of starting a start-up company and selling it to others. The property is still being managed, only by its new owners and not the original owners. You can claim this renter-owner relationship doesn't produce anything of real value - which I can agree with - but it's still a valid option for property-owners and those that can't afford to settle-down in one area.

I totally get what you're saying. But we have a similar situation in the UK, except via the private sector. Construction companies sit on development land for housing and don't build houses on it, or land speculators squat on it trying to squeeze maximal profit despite the fact society as a whole needs the damn houses.

That's the problem with some forms of rent: it can be relatively easy to extract profit from it instead of through production. So societal resources get stalled or poured not into growth, but into trying to maximise the slice of the existing pie. And inevitably because of the nature of having to have resources to own, it is the rich benefitting at the expense of the poor.

 

[Saelune]

The guy is a judge, not some random dude. He for one, should have acted like it. Instead he cries like a little *****, babbling about liking beer and letting us know that this dude was a frat guy with frat friends.

So to be clear, he's guilty because he lacked decorum when accused publicly of a serious crime, specifically in an attempt to harm his career for political reasons? Remember, being emotional means you're guilty of whatever you've been accused of, but remember men should express emotion especially in difficult situations. At least I keep getting told that nothing so is toxic masculinity.

Ford was calm, composed, and willing to endure death threats and attacks by the Republican party for the sake of justice.

You don't find it odd in the least that she could endure all that but never made a complaint to the relevant police (she still can, mind you)? That the moment it no longer had explicit political value she basically vanished? At the same time, I wouldn't worry much about her well being -- the $800k in crowdfunding can afford a fair bit of personal security.

Kavanaugh's testimony was 'I like beer'. If you think Ford's testimony is un-credible, then why do you believe Kavanaugh?

I don't really have to believe Kavanaugh. I don't even have to believe his old calendar. Not being guilty is the default position, and there are enough issues with Ford's testimony to sow doubt and that is all that is required. Not least of which being that the only real details in her testimony were that he tried to rape her, the other guy jumped on the bed which allowed her to escape, and the names of some other folks allegedly at the party where this happened. Those other people released statements that they don't recall such a party at all.

You will admit his defense was kinda shitty, but defend him, while calling Ford's defense kinda shitty and thus not believing her?

On one side you have "he raped me at a party that happened somewhere sometime that year and that I don't know how I got to or from, and these other people were there."

On the other side you have "Here's a calendar of what I was doing back then, I was a drunken party boy back then who did lots of questionable things back then (none of which were rape)." and the other people who were allegedly at the party not recalling such a party.

So, I'm doubting Ford because she has a lack of useful details and innocence is the default position. You're doubting Kavanuagh, Mark Judge, Patrick J. Smyth and Leland Ingham Keyser (three people she named as being at the party). Judge stated "I have no memory of this alleged incident," "do not recall the party" and "never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes." Smith that "I have no knowledge of the party in question." Keyser (who was also Ford's friend and thus the least likely to perjure herself to protect her rapist) stated she "does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, without, Dr. Ford."

If that doesn't lead to a criminal investigation, then that is a problem.

Why you're right, any time someone makes a public accusation that gets media attention the police should start investigating immediately. Fuck procedure and process, those just get in the way of punishing the guilty, which we know are guilty because they were accused and can't definitively prove they didn't do something 30 years ago!

Again, if she wanted an actual police investigation, all she has to do is actually make a criminal complaint. The governor of that state actually tried to compel the police to open an investigation, and the police refused because he doesn't have the power to because, how can I put this, giving the executive branch the power to demand criminal investigations against individuals is a dangerous road to go down.

If the default position is 'innocent until proven guilty', that applies to both sides. If I have to believe Kavanaugh is not a rapist until proven he is one, I also have to believe Ford is not a liar until proven one. Same goes for you.

But heres the thing, I am not stupid, nor oblivious, not under any sort of delusion that everything happens in a vacuum. Trump is a rapist. The world all agreed he was a sexist gropey pig until suddenly he was representing Republicans. Moore is a proven pedo. And men constantly get away with rape. I might believe Kavanaugh if not for the fact that Republicans are fine with sex offenders running the government, and the fact that men, especially men with power get away with tons of horrible things, and that everyone involved in supporting Kavanaugh, ie Trump, McConnel, Graham and Kavanaugh himself are all notorious lying pieces of shit.

You want to pretend this all happens in a vacuum without all the surrounding contextual evidence. You throw 'innocent until proven guilty' at me while ignoring it yourself for Ford and while ignoring all the rest of the guilt already proven.

All you have is misguided sound bytes and a blind faith in a corrupt and ineffectual legal system.

You don't need to stick your hand personally into lava to know its going to melt your hand.