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Democrat Gino Funicella of Jackson, NH sits in the left chair this week. We begin with a question from the producer asking if we think the handling of the Mueller Report by Atty. General William Barr has been impartial. I say "Yes."
Gino went off with nearly all the Democrat talking points since release of the report, that the "no evidence of cooperation by the Trump campaign with Russian interference in the 2016 election" doesn't mean what it says. He insists there was evidence but not enough to prove cooperation, but he cannot come up with any such evidence.
I get exasperated when he interrupts me repeatedly as I'm making my points citing solid evidence that there was evidence of cooperation with Russia by Democrats, and calling it "supposition." He points out all the Mueller indictments that had nothing to do with conspiring with the Russians by the Trump campaign and cites them as purported evidence that there was cooperation.
My response is to point out both ongoing and upcoming investigations into Obama Administration officials who abused power to spy on the Trump campaign and then attempt to frame him for conspiring with the Russians. Gino continues to drag red herrings into the debate to sidetrack me.
The producer asks if the next census should include a question about whether people present in America are citizens or not. Democrats don't want the question. Republicans do. I make the point that Democrats want it because all people counted will then be assumed to have citizenship and states with millions of illegal aliens, like California, will then be given more representation in Congress. They'll also get more federal assistance of various kinds. Gino doesn't want to make the citizen/non-citizen distinction.
I bring up the headline used by the New York Times to report on the Muslim slaughter of Catholics in Sri Lanka: "Religious minorities across Asia suffer amid a surge of sectarian politics." Clearly, this is worded to protect Muslims from blame and divert sympathy away from their Catholic victims. Gino disagrees.
I bring up the Notre Dame fire and how French authorities declared in only one hour that it was "not arson." They still cannot point to what did cause it but hurried to declare that it wasn't arson, in spite of the 800 Muslim attacks against Christian churches in France in 2018 alone, and one previous attempt to burn Notre Dame by three Muslim women.
Gino suggests I'm paranoid and too quick to blame Muslims for violence, and that 30% of Republicans are racist and "hate brown people."
We briefly discuss abortion developments and I claim the issue is again looming large for the 2020 election with every Democrat candidate supporting abortion. Gino disagrees.
2 comments:
The inability to prove a crime is not proof of innocence. Who believes OJ Simpson was innocent? But think about what the Mueller report revealed. Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort and his chief of staff, Gates met with Konstentin Kilimnick in a NY cigar bar where Manafort provided him with internal polling data. They also discussed swing states. Then the three of them left the building out of three different exits. Doesn’t that seem a little suspicious? Russian troll farms targeted swing districts in swing states. Doesn’t that seem a little suspicious? Kushner met with Sergey Kislyak about setting up a back channel between the White House and the Kremlin, I’m guessing not on government secured lines of communication. Doesn’t seem a little suspicious? 8 members of Trump’s team – 9 if you include Trump –all lied about their communication with Russia. Doesn’t seem a little suspicious? Trump Jr. took a meeting based on the promise of dirt on Clinton. Then he lied about the nature of the meeting, who attended and how long it lasted. Then his father lied about this role in writing the cover story for it that it was actually about adoptions and not about dirt on Clinton. Doesn’t seem a little suspicious? Wikileaks dumped its largest and most damaging cache of emails about Clinton within the hour of the Access Hollywood tape. Doesn’t that seem a little suspicious? Trump fired as many people investigating his administration’s conspiracy with Russia as he could despite his relentless claim that conspiracy never occurred. He tried to convince McGahn to fire Mueller and then lied about that, and then wanted McGahn to make a statement that Trump never asked him to fire Mueller, which McGahn refused to do. That doesn’t seem a little suspicious? Trump relentlessly berated Sessions for recusing himself from the investigation. That’s a lot of lying. Flynn was fired, because as soon as he publicly lied about communicating with Russia, he had to be viewed as a possible exploitable asset. What if we haven’t learned about every lie told by Trump and his team? Could our President and/or members of his White House be exploitable Russian assets also? That doesn’t give me a settling feeling.
(cont'd from previous post)
I’m worried about what many in the Republican party are willing to accept in order to remain faithful to their party. In your blog dated 5/30/2016, you were upset that Obama wasn’t more critical of Japan – our contemporary ally – in his speech about nuclear war that he gave on Japanese soil. In July of 2018, Trump stood on stage side by side with Putin in a show of solidarity to announce he believes Putin did not meddle in our elections despite the unanimous consensus of our entire intelligence apparatus that Russia did, in fact, meddle in our elections. In your 7/18/2018 blog, you described the media reaction to Trump/Putin press conference as “overblown.”
Consider Trump’s bizarre summary of the Soviet-Afgan war and its aftermath on 1/2/2019. He said, “Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is, it was a tough fight. And literally, they went bankrupt; they went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot of these places you’re reading about now are no longer part of Russia because of Afghanistan.” His inaccurate account of the start of the war aside, by saying, “…they went into being called Russia again…” I’m assuming is a clunky way of saying the Soviet Republic dissolved, and Russia and the other 15 Soviet Republics emerged as autonomous countries. Where in the fact and folklore of this country does that narrative exist? I was always taught it was Regan’s arms race with USSR that bankrupted them and ushered in the end of Communism in the region. I was taught to credit Regan for the end of the Soviet empire, not to blame Muslim terrorists. Why is our President repeating Soviet-era propaganda?
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