So the New Yorker thinks the whistleblower report is devastating, Instapundit says it's a nothingburger, and the instant poll says 50% of America thinks it's impeachable and 50% doesn't.
I would have preferred that a higher percentage of the public had said "Don't Know," but I guess that is asking too much.
I have my suspicions how this will develop, but prefer to observe what information comes out. There is time. There's no hurry.
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I'm through with political news for a while. My plans for the next several months involve deciding how much time/money I am going to spend on decorating the outside of my house for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. All I know for sure is that "fall" decorations aren't quite adequate for Halloween. Do I want to wear a costume this year? Last year I was a zombie housewife. I had fun asking trick or treaters "Do you think I'm pretty?" The girls were brutally honest, but the boys were ever so careful and creative with their responses. It took several days to remove all traces of the zombie make-up... and no one seemed to notice!
This year I'm thinking of going as a skeleton -- and because I'm fat, this could be hilarious. Or sad. I'm working on it.
Then there's the Thanxmas* menus I need to plan. One dessert is the one I mentioned in the "Odd Tastes" post - apple cake. It's a week of family activities. There will be Tex-Mex night, and "comfort food" night. Then, leftover night.
*Thanxsmas is the word my grandson came up with to explain why he got to celebrate Christmas twice. My side of the family can almost always get together on Thanksgiving, but never on Christmas. Now it's a "tradition" that the cousins and aunts & uncles exchange gifts the morning after Thanksgiving.
It took me a while getting though the transcript of Acting DNI Joseph Maguire's testimony, and I see that I'll need to do the same for last-week's intelligence inspector general testimony.
My apolitical predictions so far:
• In spite of commentators being derogatory of the phone call transcript, there will be no-one who was witness or participant in the call who will note anything incorrect, altered, or left out of the transcript that we've read.
• In the confusing
"I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike_ I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. .I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people."
section of the transcript, the "one of your wealthy people", "surrounding yourself with the same people" is referring explicitly to Victor Pinchuk. All the explainer articles I've seen so far about what they call the conspiracy theory part of the call identify the wealthy person as Dimitry Alperovitch, which is stupid as the fellow has no nexus with the Ukraine whatsoever.
One of my criticisms of Snopes, Politifact, and similar efforts is that they will often discuss a straw-man version of a story in order to be able to say that it is untrue. Since I'm seeing 3 nearly concurrent articles in major media (Washington Post, Wired, etc) I'm suffering from my own conspiracy theory that the word has gone out on some successor Journo-list that misdirection on the Crowdstrike portion of the phone-call must take place.
My own view is that there is no Crowdstrike/Ukraine nexus and that Trump's thinking was led awry by some of the wackier conservative media. The Wired article (https://www.wired.com/story/trump-ukraine-call-crowdstrike-dnc-russia/) is otherwise a pretty good and balanced explainer, in my view based upon what I remember of reading as things happened since 2016.
Anyway, near 50% one way and near 50% the other adds to near 100%, and I can be certain that no-where near that many have even read the complaint.
Unknown, that's interesting because if I remember yesterday all three major newspapers (NYT, WaPo, and WSJ) plus CNN and Fox excised the conversation about CrowdStrike from the memorandum in order to make it look like the favor Trump asked for was the investigation into Biden.
Per Stephen Green at Instapundit - https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/343238/
So now they did a 180 and are focused on the CrowdStrike conversation?
They are just throwing the (spaghetti) at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Since Donald Trump arrived on the scene in 2015 the media and the Democrats seem to have gone bat guano crazy. It seems like every week some new revelation of scandal by well placed patriots horrified by the Orange is going to be his downfall. And somehow it turns into a faceplant. I am reminded of a 007 line: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, thrice is enemy action. Just saying.
I say the Dems SHOULD impeach him. That will tar and feather the Dems and will keep them playing defense, defense, defense, for the next 20 years.
In what world is it reasonable to claim that a claim made by a "whistle blower" who admits he is doing nothing but repeating what is essentially unverified gossip is in any way anything other than a nothingberger short of actual evidence. Your argument is complete nonsense.
N.B. That is a different james.
Back in the early days of blogging, everybody was picking "nyms" that were nice and weird. I decided to use my name--but not all of it, to avoid getting swamped with spam, and in case I wrote something that might embarrass the kids. Unfortunately it's a pretty common name.
Thanks for alerting people to the distinction. Maybe I should use the longer form that I use over at Maggie's.
BTW: "There is no hurry" is a political position, and won't endear you to those demanding change _yesterday_ to prevent the obvious disaster that is already upon us.
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