When your lawyer has a check you wrote paying back bribery, blown up on the floor of the house and you don't immediately go to jail for simple fraud. Our potus.
>For example, just weeks ago highly placed senators were discovered to have conducted insider trading on the back of security briefings on the coronavirus pandemic
What did they know that wasn't already in the public eye? Banks were making their projects just like everyone else and nobody KNEW what was going to happen. Insider trading has a real legal definition, there was nothing in that briefing that could constitute insider trading because there was no information revealed there, just speculation that was already captured by public sources.
> Senators will have the opportunity to hear directly from senior government health officials regarding what we know about the virus so far, and how our country is prepared to respond as the situation develops.
So, non-public information regarding what the government response might be, including perhaps advising states to issue shelter-in-place orders that would tank the economy?
> there was nothing in that briefing that could constitute insider trading because there was no information revealed there
Unchecked capitalism. Capitalism that has had its systems of checks and balances slowly chipped away at by selfish leadership (I'm not pointing fingers at anyone in particular, as the history stretches back throughout multiple administrations).
As I said in a previous comment recently:
All the -isms are very loaded topics due to decades of misrepresentation (as is the nature of politics).
But, I think this post isn't the place to discuss it (which is, I think, why parent is getting downvoted).
I take your point, I'm referring more to the surrounding milieu that capitalism (as practiced in America, at least) has encouraged and driven and which it seems to have as its ultimate goal for society.
Why not Millard Filmore or Zachary Taylor? King George III, perhaps?
Regardless, I wasn't around for either but I can do a quick search and find Carter was the first sitting president questioned under oath[1], after a 7 month investigation. He was cleared but that does qualify as a scandal.
Eisenhower is going to be too easy, even as a war hero, but if you insist I will.
I suppose we should distinguish between "corruption scandal that found something", "corruption 'scandal' that cleared the President", and "corruption scandal where the President fired or tried to fire the investigators".
I'm glad you've found a metric that suits. Is this better or worse than the Afghanistan/Iraq war? Personally, I find the war(s) with its dodgy dossiers and myriad war crimes and everything that came out of it much worse but maybe I care more about people being bombed than people committing crimes like selling bank account numbers. How strange.
> He has no known connection to Trump.
Why is he listed then? I thought the headline read "All the Trump associates convicted or sentenced in the Mueller investigation" but maybe I'm wrong about that too. Am I wrong?
>Name a president of the United States (or anywhere, why limit it?) and I'll provide you with a corruption scandal that either they were linked to or happened during their tenancy.
How about I throw it back at you and ask you to name a single former President who has been involved in as many deeply serious scandals as Trump?
Can you even identify any scandals involving a Democrat President that even begin to approach the seriousness of the Stormy Daniels affair, the Ukraine affair, his ties to Russia and the assistance his campaign received from Putin, or any of the literally hundreds of major acts of corruption that have taken place under his watch and often at his explicit direction?
Both sides are not the same. No President in history has ever been as openly and completely corrupt as Trump, no political party has ever demonstrated such contempt for the rule of law and the Constitution. This is not business as usual.
the Stormy Daniels affair isn't serious, but if it is, little is known about it. A lot more is know about the Monica Lewinsky affair - I think if the same thing happened in this era it would be treated differently, at the very least the power differential between a POTUS and his aide would might dispel the notion of a simple "affair". Bill still travels with Hillary, and does tours, shaking hands with the fans.
Trumps "ties to Russia" are unproven, resources where spent on investigating it but produced very little (I notice "assistance his campaign received from Putin" could describe both Russian election meddling, and collusion, but in the context of presidential corruption only collusion matters - which is unproven).
Using "seriousness" as a metric needs to be grounded by how proven an allegation is, or else the most extreme allegation automatically wins.
I'm undecided how important the Ukraine affair is. Dem rhetoric "asking a foreign power.." has to be balanced with my own reckoning of the seriousness of things, and I'm just as suspicious the lack of noise around Hunter Biden, or FBI bias which I feel is as important, but under-highlighted because the dems generally control the narrative.
> literally hundreds of major acts of corruption
> no political party has ever demonstrated such contempt for the rule of law and the Constitution
according to who? The press? People constantly fight over interpretations of the constitution, "contempt" always follows from "my particular interpretation [of the constitution]", and I see a lot of contempt of law on the dem side wrt rules considered "unjust" - Do Sanctuary cities follow rule of law?
Trying to twist legal definitions to force state consent for the Equal Rights Amendment (we can extend the time window to allow votes past the deadline, but you can't change your vote if the electorate no longer vote the same as they did in the original window).
Russian oligarchs are the only ones willing to front the money for Trump's projects because his credit is so bad. You think they aren't getting something in return?
> How about I throw it back at you and ask you to name a single former President who has been involved in as many deeply serious scandals as Trump?
Firstly, I would be cautious in an era of big government and vastly more media than previous governments in case of falling prey to the diagnosis fallacy. Regardless, yes, I could.
> Can you even identify any scandals involving a Democrat President that even begin to approach the seriousness of the Stormy Daniels affair, the Ukraine affair, his ties to Russia and the assistance his campaign received from Putin, or any of the literally hundreds of major acts of corruption that have taken place under his watch and often at his explicit direction?
That's easy, Bill Clinton.
> the Stormy Daniels affair
Monica Lewinsky, and that was a far bigger scandal
> the Ukraine affair
Operation Infinite Reach, a war crime if you ask me (and many others). Has Trump committed any war crimes? Bombed any pharmaceutical facilities that produce medicines for some of the most deprived and needy people on the planet?
> his ties to Russia
I can't believe people are still into this one, but lets go for White Water for that one.
> any of the literally hundreds of major acts of corruption
If we're going for rhetoric instead of anything substantial then Christopher Hitchens will always win, though this is one of his more mundane descriptions: "a crooked President and a corrupt and reactionary administration"
I'm old enough to remember before Trump, and I struggle to remember an American president who wasn't mired in scandal, but "Trump bad" must mean it was all nothing much.
The huge number of people killed in drone attacks[1], including a 16 year old US citizen[2] (and the subsequent killing of his younger sister, also reprehensible).
Is killing people in other countries like that not scandalous? I thought it was terrible under Bush Jr so I've no idea how I'm supposed to give Obama a pass.
So, again, I have this president and his 2 predecessors (do I really need to go over Bush Jr?) and in another comment the 3rd predecessor, Clinton, all embroilled in scandals and reprehensible behaviour. I can go on.
One thing I never understood, how drone attacks were a scandal. Yes, he ordered the killing of people. And the legality of these killings is indeed arguable, in the sense that the legality of the whole war is arguable. But I don't see huge protest marches against those wars.
Yes, sometimes the missile strike killed the wrong people. Again, horrible. But do people really think that bomb strikes performed by other presidents killed only "bad guys"? If anything, my interpretation of the situation is that Obama was more transparent than previous administrations, and that drones and drone strikes have reduced the human cost. Both through precision, but also because it is "better" to kill the leader in his bed, than his 50 soldiers in a gun fight.
No-one objected when he ordered a team of soldiers to fly in and kill Bin Laden, why does it become a scandal if you do the same thing with a missle? For those that say "but it was Bin Laden", as the military personnel responsible for the strike explained at the time, they flew missions like that every week.
Would it have been better if Obama had lauched indiscriminative airstrikes on anonymous coordinates, with no camera footage and analysis? Just "we killed 3 bad guys yesterday"?
As an aside, your original statement was that all presidents were involvd in a corruption scandal.
> Is killing people in other countries like that not scandalous?
I point out you specifically said you'd point out a corruption scandal. Your cited use of force may be scandalous or even a war crime, but it's a stretch to call it 'corrupt'.
That's classic whataboutism. To say that "every president has corruption scandals" is to ignore the scale, depth, and sheer incompetence in commission of corrupt activities in the current administration.
Even Nixon knew that once they had the tapes admitting to a crime, he was sunk. Trump just says it right into the microphone on television.
No, whataboutism would be to deflect from criticism. I am putting the correct perspective on an absurd statement by showing that it is not anomalous. They're two quite different things.
