indictments

[mellowtigger]

The charges in today's indictments are quite serious. You wouldn't know from Fox News summaries that I've seen, or from Trump's attempt to downplay their significance, but more on that later.

I've noticed for years that Republicans are masters of a psychological skill called "transference". Truly masters of it. I'm amazed by them frequently when they make a claim (which is actually true about themselves) against someone else, so we don't associate the concept with the accuser but the accused.  Democrats, meanwhile, just sit there like deer in headlights every time that it happens to them. It's so effective that when a high ranking Republican makes a complaint about a Democrat, I immediately start wondering what that Republican speaker has done wrong that they're now trying to hide by redirection.

For instance, we heard years of Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi with not a single shred of evidence to support the hubbub. Or, as David Brin (an intellectual and self-described conservative) puts it today during #MuellerMonday indictments of Manafort and Gates:

"But... after all that, what did they get? A Secretary of State who mistakenly used exactly the same email method as all her GOP predecessors, and a husband who fibbed about some consensual-adult 3rd base infidelity in a hallway. That's it, after 25 years and half a billion $ and enough screaming to get us to Pluto and beyond. Either the Clinton Obama 'scandals' were/are all incantations... conspiracy-porn lies... or Republicans are too incompetent to deserve trust with a burnt match."
https://plus.google.com/+davidbrin1/posts/GNXwL3YK5yj

Republicans are bad at telling the truth, I think partly because they're so accustomed with succeeding at redirection. They're not used to being held accountable for their own problems. And it's finally catching up to them.

Did you know that Republicans in the executive branch are many-times-over more likely to end up in prison than Democrats? Republicans currently control (fully or nominally) all 3 branches of the federal government plus almost 2/3 of state governors, so nobody can pretend that this Republican administration's problems are the fault of Democrats. This current government is Republican, so they should own their problems. 

The actual incarceration count would be higher, of course, but (as Trump himself demonstrated recently) Republicans also have a history of pardoning their own crimes.

"In the criminal convictions contest, the score is Republicans 89, Democrats 1. And that’s not even counting all the high-level Iran-Contra folks who probably would have been convicted of various felonies if they hadn’t been pardoned by GHW Bush."
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/06/our-score-so-far-republicans-89-democrats-1/

I'm not absolving Democrats, but I'm also not accepting redirection efforts today.  I have complaints to lodge against Democrats too, but they'll get a separate post to consider their modern problems.  Both parties can have problems simultaneously, but right now the nation is looking at Republicans.  We've all spent years hearing about Benghazi, so let's spend some time now talking about Russia instead.

Today's excitement on Twitter and Fox News includes a lot of downplay, but read these first two sentences of the actual indictment document from the U.S. Department Of Justice website:

Defendants PAUL J. MANAFORT, JR., (MANAFORT) and RICHARD W. GATES III (GATES) served for years as political consultants and lobbyists. Between at least 2006 and 2015, MANAFORT and GATES acted as unregistered agents of the Government of Ukraine, the Party of Regions (a Ukrainian political party whose leader Victor Yanukovych was President from 2010 to 2014), Yanukovych, and the Opposition Bloc (a successor to the Party of Regions that formed in 2014 when Yanukovych fled to Russia).
https://www.justice.gov/file/1007271/download

Russia, Russia, Russia everywhere.  Sure, it's a former Russian territory and former pro-Russian politician, but there it is in plain sight anyway.  It's significant in itself, but it's hardly the end of the accusations. There's still a question of the significance of a claimed "blood money" reference by Manafort's daughter.  And is Paul Singer the link that ties this Russian business to the Clinton campaign (which bought second-hand the Trump opposition research that was originally compiled for a Republican group during the primaries)?

Wired magazine provides a very good explanation of this indictment process. I recommend reading the whole thing. The government gets Manafort in custody, then they press ever more serious consequences in hopes of getting cooperation against "bigger fish" from all of the "smaller fish".

As the case unfolds, there will almost assuredly be charges that, in many ways, form the foundation of many federal cases: obstruction of justice, perjury, or lying to federal agents (a k a “making false statements”). These charges are particularly common in special counsel–type investigations and can end up targeting people unrelated to the original criminal act.
www.wired.com/story/how-to-interpret-robert-muellers-new-charges/

So, some people (like Trump himself) want to claim that these charges are unrelated to the Trump presidency. Perhaps. But Manafort was Trump's campaign chairman. That association cannot be hidden.  This collaboration is how Trump "drains the swamp"?

More truths will be revealed as time passes.