You Will Anyway: What was McConnell's angle?

Saturday, September 28, 2019

What was McConnell's angle?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) reportedly encouraged President Trump to release the memorandum of his controversial call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Two people familiar with the conversation told The Washington Post that McConnell encouraged the White House to release the reconstituted transcript to reinforce Trump’s claim that nothing improper happened during the conversation, explaining that speculation about the call had escalated too far.

The Hill

Did he actually think that would help or was he secretly pushing Trump to self-destruct?

McConnell went to the Senate floor earlier this week to praise the White House after it announced it would release the transcript.

“I also want to express my appreciation for President Trump's announcement that the White House will release tomorrow the complete, fully-declassified, and unredacted transcript of [his] phone conversation with President Zelensky,” he said. “I hope this will help to refocus the conversation away from reckless speculation and back toward the facts.”

The facts are damning, as is the transcript - and we didn't even get the whole thing (remember the ellipses?). Did he not know what was in it when he said this? He'll be getting the blame from those Trump supporters who aren't blaming Rudy.

Pence knew.

Vice President Pence urged President Trump not to release a memo detailing his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

[...]

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Pence fell in line and ultimately supported the report's public release, but privately counseled Trump against the matter when it was first raised.

[...]

Pence argued Thursday that the readout of Trump's call with Zelensky "completely vindicated" the president, whose allies have argued that Trump never sought to tie an investigation into Biden to a concrete promise of U.S. aid during his conversations with Ukrainian officials.

The Hill

Which is why he advised Trump not to release it?

And when are we going to see the Pence call to Zelensky that Trump mentioned in order to drag Pence into the fire?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.