Impeachment

[Kirkland Laing]

Granted....... I'm saying all this and I..... 1) preferred Trump over Hillary, 2) have criticized the Democratic Party till I'm blue in the face, 3) have given Trump his due on the things I feel he's done right. But I refuse to be polarized to the extreme 99.99999999 % of the people are regarding Trump.

Well tits this quite differs from your first post on the subject. If you are calling Trump the most divisive president are you leaving aside the war presidents?

War presidents? Because half the nation doesn't want war and the other does? Well.... that's kind of unavoidable, isn't it.

We're not talking about differences in basic philosophies here. Even Presidents who have chosen to go to war have tried to unite the nation behind them.

We're talking about a POTUS who can barely hide his glee when people are going at each others' throats. The worse the carnage, the happier he is.

Historically I don’t think he is the most divisive president. Shit look at Carter and he didn’t use any bad words. I see all the hate, I think it gets a little overboard. I really don’t see any of his policies or deregulation’s as bad. He says stupid stuff it doesn’t really bother me that much. I do have some serious concerns over a certain faction of the democrats. Funny we don’t hear much about it but when the tea party was first around damn they were torn up and targeted by the IRS etc. now we have a group of people holding office that call certain parts of our law enforcement bodies evil. I’m not big on law enforcement I think they have too much power and don’t always use it properly but I wouldn’t call ICE workers Nazis and want them abolished. Anyway things are what they are, I get annoyed with Trump sometimes but the squad and the radical arm of the Dems seriously scare me. They want to do some frightening shit. I’ll take bad words and stupid tweets over that anyday. Talk about divisive

How was Carter divisive?


The IRS scandal came to a pathetic, whimpering conclusion earlier this month. For half a decade the scandal had kept delinquent members of Congress occupied and served up reliable programming to Fox News and other conservative media. But when Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen walked out of his office on Nov. 9, of his own volition, on schedule, his fine reputation intact, the whole greasy production quietly expired.

Shortly before Koskinen left office, the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration released the (presumably) final report on the scandal. Like a previous Inspector General report, it tried to soothe Republican feelings – the IRS really, really should’ve handled things differently -- while utterly refuting Republican charges about what had transpired.
The story told by Republicans is so well known that it substitutes for fact. In the first years of the Obama administration, Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations rose up to defy the government. When the groups sought IRS approval for their designations as “social welfare” organizations under the tax code, the IRS targeted them with burdensome queries, harassing the groups while slow-walking reviews of their applications. In this telling, it was a political vendetta – carried out against conservatives by a government agency that many anti-government, anti-tax conservatives especially despised.
Republicans claimed the IRS served as an attack dog for the Obama White House. But inquiries by the House Ways and Means Committee, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the Senate Finance Committee, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and the Justice Department all failed to produce evidence of political interference.
Perhaps it was because the premise of the scandal -- that Obama’s political team would want to destroy local Tea Party groups -- was absurd. For Democrats, local Tea Party groups were a political Giving Tree, bearing glorious, loopy fruit such as Christine O’Donnell and Todd Akin, Tea Party candidates who managed to lose crucial Senate campaigns that a competent Republican – perhaps any competent Republican -- would’ve won.
What’s more, none of the groups actually needed IRS approval to operate. “These organizations didn’t have to wait for the IRS to tell them anything to go into business,” Koskinen said in a telephone interview last week.
Yet the IRS clearly applied extra scrutiny to groups that it thought might be engaged in too much politics to warrant the preferential tax designation. One way IRS personnel did that was to look for key words, such as “Tea Party.” Other words that triggered IRS scrutiny included: “Occupy,” “green energy,” “medical marijuana” and “progressive.”
Contrary to the Republican story, the IRS never targeted conservatives. The IRS targeted politics, which was pretty much what it was supposed to do.



The scandal wasn’t just a production to keep fringe Republicans busy and far removed from serious business. It was part of a propaganda campaign with institutional GOP support all the way up to the speaker of the House.
An October story in Politico quoted retired House Speaker John Boehner in a fit of candor. Freed from his party obligations, Boehner was unsparing in his denunciations of two of the IRS scandal’s biggest promoters – House Freedom Caucus leader Jim Jordan of Ohio and former Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah.
As head of the House oversight committee, Chaffetz had tirelessly flogged the IRS scandal. Boehner called him a “total phony.” Boehner described Jordan in more incendiary terms, calling the champion of government shutdowns, budget showboating and governing chaos a “legislative terrorist.”
Both men earned their labels. Yet the gutter tactics that brought each to prominence were championed by Boehner himself. He invested Chaffetz and California Representative Darrell Issa with vast investigative powers, and then indulged the falsehoods and character assassination in which they trafficked. He mounted a Benghazi extravaganza that had more theatrical lives than "Cats."



https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/ar...candal-at-last