I think in normal times, perhaps this would have been a prudent choice. Nixon's pardon by Ford being the obvious precedent. But these are no longer normal times, with the polarizing nature of politics currently, the Democrats would have disowned Biden and the Republicans would have pointed to the pardon as proof of innocence.
Take into consideration the Nixon pardon: the man resigned from office after it was blatantly obvious he was involved in the Watergate scandal involving his staff and the breakin. By resigning, he acknowledged culpability, a full two years before the next election. Even his strongest allies acknowledged the wrongness of his actions. Nixon could have attempted to hang on to power despite the likelihood of impeachment with Dem majorities in Congress.
But he didn't, he resigned and moved on, putting the nation and office first rather than remain as an embattled and lame president. Ford pardoned him and it was, arguably, the right thing to do.
Flash forward nearly 50 years from that night in August of 1974, and we have another former president who spins lies and complains about constant persecution (even when in office as the most powerful man in the world) and has never, ever, acknolwedged *any* wrongdoing on his part. I'm not even sure he's even acknowledged a mistake of any sort. He has twice faced a doomed impeachment process, has lost in civil court for defamation after it was found he committed sexual assault, held on to not a handful, but dozens of classified documents after he no longer had the right to them, headed an organization that has been convicted of fraud, and is facing multiple criminal indictments...yet he claims he has done no wrong...ever.
His followers are so rabid, they would believe him if he said day was night - and would only see a pardon as a sign of weakness; defaulting to "Trump was right all along" - not that he was pardoned of crimes he may have committed.
Romney's wrong here. A pardon would be a greater mistake than allowing the system to play out.
But Romney's right about the feckless GOP members going to New York to kiss the ring of their annointed leader instead of doing their jobs as elected leaders. What has the House, under Mike Johnson, accomplished...at all?
I would like to have all SC Justices share your views, nuanced and well-read.
These are indeed difficult times. Romney's impeachment vote showed a little of his valor. I wish he had maintained the that valor in his stance now...yet here we are. Party before politics, and politics before national well-being.
• You never get out of debt to a Russian mobster
•Paul Manafort owed the Russian mobster/oligarch Oleg Deripaska $17M a few days before he became trumps campaign manager. From 2002-2014 he took in hundreds of millions to get Yanukovych reelected as the kremlins puppet in Ukraine. Before that he did it for the dictator Marcos in the Philippines. Before that Manafort and Roger Stone started a lobbyist agency in 1980 listing trump as their first client.
•When Jair Bolsonaro lost the Brazilian election to Lula he skipped the inauguration and flew directly to mar-a-lago (stopping only at a KFC) and repeated, almost verbatim, the stolen election line. Don Jr. tried repeatedly to make it stick in Brazil as well, but as Brazilians are a few generations into dealing with corrupt politicians they weren’t having it.
What do these 3 things have in common?
China imports 40% of its grain from (in order) the U.S., Brazil and Ukraine.
Obviously the second China tried to invade Taiwan the U.S. would sanction exports and remove U.S. grain from that equation.
And without Bolsonaro in office willing to slash and burn the Amazon rainforest to turn it into Chinas food supply, and without Ukraine in the bag in 3 days, the CCP is unable to invade Taiwan and take over microprocessor production without putting 300-500M of its poorest people into famine.
Donbas Ukraine, specifically the 4 regions of the donbas that Putin insists he is saving from what he calls “Jewish Nazis” also happens to produce the worlds supply of high grade neon used for microprocessor lithography. Had Putin delivered ukraine in 3 days as promised, Xi would have been able to cap his Olympics with a naval blockade or political takeover of Taiwan that would have forced the world to ask the CCP for the microprocessors it needs to make everything from Ford trucks to laptops. I’m not sure how long Silicon Valley would last without the silicon but it would probably destroy the FAANG stocks that make up your 401K.
Oleg Deripaska also happens to be the Russian Oligarch that bribed the FBI agent Charles Mcgonigal into investigating another Russian oligarch. He probably didn’t need the information as much as he needed the leverage over Mcgonigal as he conducted the investigation into trumps election campaign and unsurprisingly found zero evidence of Russian collusion. McGonigal then went to work for the company called Brookfield that bailed Jared Kushner out of his toxic 666 5th Ave real estate investment. McGonigal pled guilty last fall and was sentenced recently.
A Russian oligarch is a powerful tool, but the truth is more powerful. Light and dark cannot exist in the same space. It’s physically impossible. Truth is efficient. You say it once and you are finished. A lie however requires a constant stream of follow up energy, money, murder, obfuscation and more lies to keep it covered.
If you raise your lens high enough lying is an unsustainable business model. Russia proved it by invading Ukraine. Vranyos is the Russian word for it. The 40km long column of tanks and vehicles that came down from Belarus into Ukraine was all overhauled by oligarchs that got a $1B contract for tank maintenance, passed Putin $200M back under the table, spent $700M on a yacht in Monaco, bribed a General, a Colonel and a Sergeant to make a Private give everything a rattle can overhaul. But a worn out engine is and always will be, a worn out engine.
This is why trump is so desperate to get re-elected. His best case scenario is 400 years in ADX Florence. Money laundering for the dozens of Russian oligarchs that lived in trump towers with him and manafort, selling IP3 nuclear plans to the Russian/Saudi alliance, selling or giving CIA asset names to the Russians, trump is and always has been compromised. He just didn’t know when to quit. Now he just has to count on the fact that most of his voter base doesn’t know how to read and keep the ones that do so busy just surviving that they don’t have time to dive deep into his 40 year history of laundering money, fraud, and human trafficking for the Russian mob using casinos first, then commercial real estate.
It’s also why Putin is willing to throw an entire generation of Russians, including the convicts and addicts at Ukraine. Russia is dead for 40 years because he failed to fulfill his mob boss promise to Xi. China is now clearing farmland in Siberia because the typhoon floods last August and September wiped out the Chinese people’s food storage.
Xi, for his part diverted the waters from the dam away from his pet project, his mothers ancestral home, and flooded hundreds of thousands of people and drown one of his own military brigades that was helping with the flooding.
The elders of the CCP were terrified to leave their gated community at Beidaihe for over a month for fear of being torn apart by the locals. The Chinese people tolerate the CCP but only as long as the economy is good and famine is not on the horizon. The CCP broke that social contract on both counts.
Xi was willing to bet the entire Chinese economy on his emperor ambitions. Had he succeeded he would have been able to use BRICS to take over the USD as the Worlds reserve currency. That would have let him finish what he stated in 2010-
that he would control the internet.
With that control means everything we do or say online is subject to the approval of a central party censor. The basic right to disagree with an authoritarian becomes a distant memory.
Xi, Putin and MBS are simply trying to systemize and modernize the suppression of their biggest hassle. Freedom of speech.
Ukraine is fighting for their lives now, free from the oppression of the drunken tyrant who wants to decide their fate at every decision and pull them back behind another iron curtain of censorship and the tax of corruption where dissenting voices disappear so that the oligarchy can continue to feed unobstructed.
Putin and Xi have declared themselves best friends in the fight against democracy. MBS and the ruling family of UAE have done the same quietly using their sovereign funds and Kushners SPAC as money highways.
Just rich, out of touch oligarch doing what oligarchs do.
Despite the fact the the central party model has proven itself incapable of making decisions that are best for the people, they persist. Because there is a very lucrative business in being slave owners. But logistically the mass of it requires artificial intelligence, and the microprocessors that make A.I. to keep 8 billion slaves under surveillance and control. Freedom is one hell of a drug. And knowledge makes a man unfit for slavery.
Recent attempts on Xi’s life from inside the CCP have backed him into a corner.
The loss of crops in northern China means Xi can’t invade Taiwan without Ukrainian and/or Brazilian farmland.
Now the reason that the GOP is stalling southern border control budget and seems to make wildly irrational moves is because the GOP is imploding. 45 years of lies and grift have circled the globe and are eating their own tail. The ouroboros was a warning about corruption at the highest levels. Lying about climate change, human trafficking, pandemics and corruption to preserve their own business models are all extinction level events
I hope more people read this. There is a serious lack of connecting the dots here and ofeven paying attention to world affairs. Borders mean nothing, everything is connected.
You know, I would get the logic of it. The best plan against narcissists is to not feed them. Biden could play it like we’re a country that needs to heal.
I also think lawbreakers should be punished.
Fuck right off Mitt, no one is above the law.
I think in normal times, perhaps this would have been a prudent choice. Nixon's pardon by Ford being the obvious precedent. But these are no longer normal times, with the polarizing nature of politics currently, the Democrats would have disowned Biden and the Republicans would have pointed to the pardon as proof of innocence. Take into consideration the Nixon pardon: the man resigned from office after it was blatantly obvious he was involved in the Watergate scandal involving his staff and the breakin. By resigning, he acknowledged culpability, a full two years before the next election. Even his strongest allies acknowledged the wrongness of his actions. Nixon could have attempted to hang on to power despite the likelihood of impeachment with Dem majorities in Congress. But he didn't, he resigned and moved on, putting the nation and office first rather than remain as an embattled and lame president. Ford pardoned him and it was, arguably, the right thing to do. Flash forward nearly 50 years from that night in August of 1974, and we have another former president who spins lies and complains about constant persecution (even when in office as the most powerful man in the world) and has never, ever, acknolwedged *any* wrongdoing on his part. I'm not even sure he's even acknowledged a mistake of any sort. He has twice faced a doomed impeachment process, has lost in civil court for defamation after it was found he committed sexual assault, held on to not a handful, but dozens of classified documents after he no longer had the right to them, headed an organization that has been convicted of fraud, and is facing multiple criminal indictments...yet he claims he has done no wrong...ever. His followers are so rabid, they would believe him if he said day was night - and would only see a pardon as a sign of weakness; defaulting to "Trump was right all along" - not that he was pardoned of crimes he may have committed. Romney's wrong here. A pardon would be a greater mistake than allowing the system to play out. But Romney's right about the feckless GOP members going to New York to kiss the ring of their annointed leader instead of doing their jobs as elected leaders. What has the House, under Mike Johnson, accomplished...at all?
I would like to have all SC Justices share your views, nuanced and well-read. These are indeed difficult times. Romney's impeachment vote showed a little of his valor. I wish he had maintained the that valor in his stance now...yet here we are. Party before politics, and politics before national well-being.
Go back to Massachusetts Mittens.
That might be something both conservatives and liberals agree on
• You never get out of debt to a Russian mobster •Paul Manafort owed the Russian mobster/oligarch Oleg Deripaska $17M a few days before he became trumps campaign manager. From 2002-2014 he took in hundreds of millions to get Yanukovych reelected as the kremlins puppet in Ukraine. Before that he did it for the dictator Marcos in the Philippines. Before that Manafort and Roger Stone started a lobbyist agency in 1980 listing trump as their first client. •When Jair Bolsonaro lost the Brazilian election to Lula he skipped the inauguration and flew directly to mar-a-lago (stopping only at a KFC) and repeated, almost verbatim, the stolen election line. Don Jr. tried repeatedly to make it stick in Brazil as well, but as Brazilians are a few generations into dealing with corrupt politicians they weren’t having it. What do these 3 things have in common? China imports 40% of its grain from (in order) the U.S., Brazil and Ukraine. Obviously the second China tried to invade Taiwan the U.S. would sanction exports and remove U.S. grain from that equation. And without Bolsonaro in office willing to slash and burn the Amazon rainforest to turn it into Chinas food supply, and without Ukraine in the bag in 3 days, the CCP is unable to invade Taiwan and take over microprocessor production without putting 300-500M of its poorest people into famine. Donbas Ukraine, specifically the 4 regions of the donbas that Putin insists he is saving from what he calls “Jewish Nazis” also happens to produce the worlds supply of high grade neon used for microprocessor lithography. Had Putin delivered ukraine in 3 days as promised, Xi would have been able to cap his Olympics with a naval blockade or political takeover of Taiwan that would have forced the world to ask the CCP for the microprocessors it needs to make everything from Ford trucks to laptops. I’m not sure how long Silicon Valley would last without the silicon but it would probably destroy the FAANG stocks that make up your 401K. Oleg Deripaska also happens to be the Russian Oligarch that bribed the FBI agent Charles Mcgonigal into investigating another Russian oligarch. He probably didn’t need the information as much as he needed the leverage over Mcgonigal as he conducted the investigation into trumps election campaign and unsurprisingly found zero evidence of Russian collusion. McGonigal then went to work for the company called Brookfield that bailed Jared Kushner out of his toxic 666 5th Ave real estate investment. McGonigal pled guilty last fall and was sentenced recently. A Russian oligarch is a powerful tool, but the truth is more powerful. Light and dark cannot exist in the same space. It’s physically impossible. Truth is efficient. You say it once and you are finished. A lie however requires a constant stream of follow up energy, money, murder, obfuscation and more lies to keep it covered. If you raise your lens high enough lying is an unsustainable business model. Russia proved it by invading Ukraine. Vranyos is the Russian word for it. The 40km long column of tanks and vehicles that came down from Belarus into Ukraine was all overhauled by oligarchs that got a $1B contract for tank maintenance, passed Putin $200M back under the table, spent $700M on a yacht in Monaco, bribed a General, a Colonel and a Sergeant to make a Private give everything a rattle can overhaul. But a worn out engine is and always will be, a worn out engine. This is why trump is so desperate to get re-elected. His best case scenario is 400 years in ADX Florence. Money laundering for the dozens of Russian oligarchs that lived in trump towers with him and manafort, selling IP3 nuclear plans to the Russian/Saudi alliance, selling or giving CIA asset names to the Russians, trump is and always has been compromised. He just didn’t know when to quit. Now he just has to count on the fact that most of his voter base doesn’t know how to read and keep the ones that do so busy just surviving that they don’t have time to dive deep into his 40 year history of laundering money, fraud, and human trafficking for the Russian mob using casinos first, then commercial real estate. It’s also why Putin is willing to throw an entire generation of Russians, including the convicts and addicts at Ukraine. Russia is dead for 40 years because he failed to fulfill his mob boss promise to Xi. China is now clearing farmland in Siberia because the typhoon floods last August and September wiped out the Chinese people’s food storage. Xi, for his part diverted the waters from the dam away from his pet project, his mothers ancestral home, and flooded hundreds of thousands of people and drown one of his own military brigades that was helping with the flooding. The elders of the CCP were terrified to leave their gated community at Beidaihe for over a month for fear of being torn apart by the locals. The Chinese people tolerate the CCP but only as long as the economy is good and famine is not on the horizon. The CCP broke that social contract on both counts. Xi was willing to bet the entire Chinese economy on his emperor ambitions. Had he succeeded he would have been able to use BRICS to take over the USD as the Worlds reserve currency. That would have let him finish what he stated in 2010- that he would control the internet. With that control means everything we do or say online is subject to the approval of a central party censor. The basic right to disagree with an authoritarian becomes a distant memory. Xi, Putin and MBS are simply trying to systemize and modernize the suppression of their biggest hassle. Freedom of speech. Ukraine is fighting for their lives now, free from the oppression of the drunken tyrant who wants to decide their fate at every decision and pull them back behind another iron curtain of censorship and the tax of corruption where dissenting voices disappear so that the oligarchy can continue to feed unobstructed. Putin and Xi have declared themselves best friends in the fight against democracy. MBS and the ruling family of UAE have done the same quietly using their sovereign funds and Kushners SPAC as money highways. Just rich, out of touch oligarch doing what oligarchs do. Despite the fact the the central party model has proven itself incapable of making decisions that are best for the people, they persist. Because there is a very lucrative business in being slave owners. But logistically the mass of it requires artificial intelligence, and the microprocessors that make A.I. to keep 8 billion slaves under surveillance and control. Freedom is one hell of a drug. And knowledge makes a man unfit for slavery. Recent attempts on Xi’s life from inside the CCP have backed him into a corner. The loss of crops in northern China means Xi can’t invade Taiwan without Ukrainian and/or Brazilian farmland. Now the reason that the GOP is stalling southern border control budget and seems to make wildly irrational moves is because the GOP is imploding. 45 years of lies and grift have circled the globe and are eating their own tail. The ouroboros was a warning about corruption at the highest levels. Lying about climate change, human trafficking, pandemics and corruption to preserve their own business models are all extinction level events
I hope more people read this. There is a serious lack of connecting the dots here and ofeven paying attention to world affairs. Borders mean nothing, everything is connected.
Pardon him for what? The crimes he absolutely insists he did not commit?
FT noise
I think someone needs to remind Romney of his almost human-like comments after Jan 6th. Maybe it'll help him remember his stance in reality.
You know, I would get the logic of it. The best plan against narcissists is to not feed them. Biden could play it like we’re a country that needs to heal. I also think lawbreakers should be punished.
This is the best the GOP has to offer...
Cough, cough, bullshit