I am almost willing to watch this incredible clusterf!ck that will be televised today. But I just cannot stand the idea of how the Reps will stop any kind of actual inquiry happen(think Lindsay Graham’s performance at the Kavanaugh hearings).
Meanwhile, Anderson Cooper sums it up best:
“A known liar who lied for another known liar because the liar told him to lie and paid him to lie.”
I know I don’t trust Cohen at all, if I trust him more than Trump, but his pre testimony leak is instructive:
“He is a racist.
He is a conman.
He is a cheat”
Cannot talk about the other claims(until there is documentation of some relevant information to confirm them, but on these three I can.
They are all true. There are literally decades of actual, undeniable facts that show trump is all of those things.
debarred lawyer, innumerable perjuries, convicted felon reporting for jail in May, democrats’ disdainful line of questioning rehashed the disproved media soundbites that have not worked since July 16…………
The Republican Party Completely and Utterly Disgraced Itself at Michael Cohen’s Hearing
The questioning from these products of the conservative bubble world was so bad it made a career hoodlum look good.
By Charles P. Pierce
Feb 27, 2019
“I mention this bit of history only to illustrate how utterly and completely the Republican Party disgraced itself on Wednesday when Michael Cohen, the current president*’s former king fixer, sat before the House Oversight Committee to describe some of the garish and baroque offenses against the law and the republic committed by Donald Trump. There was not a single Railsback to be found. Not one Republican asked a question about the specific offenses that Cohen had illuminated in his opening statement…..
This was a vivid look into the chronic ward of the prion disease that has eaten away the higher functions of American conservatism—and, thus, those of the Republican Party as well—since Ronald Reagan first served up the monkey brains almost 40 years ago. These are the complete creatures of the talk-show culture, the perfect products of two and three generations of gerrymandered in-breeding. These are the monsters from inside The Bubble. You could see this moment coming during the Obama years, in which the country returned the two worst Congresses in American history, full to the gunwales with Bible-banging crazy people. Sooner or later, this was going to be all that was left, and it was going to have to confront a serious crisis with unserious people. That’s what Wednesday was about.
As for Cohen, he gave as good as he got, and it was easy to forget for a moment what a bought-and-paid-for hoodlum he’d always been. He did the contrition dance deftly and, by and large, managed to stay cool under Meadows’s provocation and Jordan’s idiocies. He even did a better job debunking some of the alleged Trump misdeeds—love-children, the mysterious meeting in Prague—than the Republicans on the commitee bothered to do. There was something about him that yearned for the old days when he was sitting around Trump Tower with the boss, paying off porn stars and threatening high-school records offices. It would have been poignant if it wasn’t all as sordid as the worst brothel on the Singapore docks.”
“During his testimony to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, on Wednesday, Michael Cohen raised his bushy eyebrows and nodded emphatically as he read out the damning particulars of yet another alleged lie that Donald Trump has told the American people. The President, Cohen said in his opening statement, had admitted to him that his decades-old story about why he did not serve in the Vietnam War was false, revealing that he had never had bone-spur surgery, as he claimed in order to receive a medical deferment. The disclosure from Trump came during the 2016 campaign, when Cohen’s job was to shut down the bad press coverage of Trump’s dubious explanation for why he had not served in Vietnam.
Amid Cohen’s many sensational claims of criminal wrongdoing by the President, it was perhaps understandable that this one Trump lie of many did not dominate the headlines. In seven hours of testimony, Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer testified that the President had paid hush money to cover up an affair with a porn star and produced signed checks to prove it; that he had known in advance about the WikiLeaks dump of hacked Democratic e-mails during the 2016 campaign; that he had engaged in a wide array of questionable and possibly illegal business practices; and that he had lied to the public about doing business in Russia throughout his race for the Presidency. With so much alleged wrongdoing to contemplate, Cohen’s claim that Trump was both a Vietnam draft dodger and an inveterate liar about it was almost a throwaway.
Yet Cohen disclosed this on a day when Trump was actually in Vietnam, having travelled there to broker a breakthrough deal on nuclear disarmament with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un.
‘I find it ironic,’ Cohen said in his testimony, addressing the former boss he once promised to take a bullet for, ‘that you are in Vietnam right now.’
Ironic is one word for it; incredible is another. Earlier that morning, Trump had offered a rich example of his you-can’t-make-this-up Presidency. Sitting in his Hanoi hotel room before going to one of the most important negotiating sessions of his Presidency, Trump took the time to preëmpt Cohen’s Vietnam-draft-dodger allegation with an attack of his own, Twitter-taunting the Connecticut Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal (‘Da Nang Dick,’ in Trumpspeak) as a Vietnam ‘total fraud,’ because he has been accused of misrepresenting his service record. ‘I have now spent more time in Vietnam’ than Blumenthal, Trump tweeted. Some days, Trump is so brazen it is breathtaking. Wednesday was one of those days.
By Thursday morning, however, it was clear that no amount of Trump bluster or deflection could obscure the twin disasters of the last twenty-four hours. Trump had finally gone to Vietnam, and lost the battle, if not the war. Back in Washington, the Cohen testimony had been a humiliation, the most public turning on a President by his lawyer since the White House counsel John Dean warned Richard Nixon, in 1973, that Watergate was a ‘cancer on the Presidency.’ One striking aspect of Cohen’s testimony was that Republican members of the House Oversight and Reform Committee chose not to argue with the substance of the allegations against Trump, in effect refusing to mount a defense of the President. Instead, they concentrated their questioning on matters designed to undercut the already suspect credibility of Cohen, who will soon go to prison for, among other things, lying to Congress.In Hanoi, meanwhile, the deal that Trump had hoped to cut with Kim failed to materialize—even the shameless flattery that Trump had lavished on the young dictator was insufficient to sway Kim from his demands for immediate sanctions relief while maintaining North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Trump had no choice but to leave Hanoi empty-handed.”
Does anyone here believe Cohen would lie again to Congress and risk getting a longer prison term? The liar was in Vietnam.
Trump does brings up a significant topic. During Vietnam and until the seventies, many of us were drafted. I sat and listened to a long clip of a Veterans Committee trying to decide who to elect to serve on it. One former member decided not to run. He had solicited a check in donation to the Veterans fund to be made out to him. His reasoning? He wanted to buy a plaque to be hung in the County Police Departments office honoring Veterans. The check was for $400 and the expenditure exceeded $500 (he paid the difference). In my book, typically in bylaws governing committees of this nature, and by law; this action is a misappropriation of funds regardless of intent. You may have a different opinion.
I was listening to this meeting intently as veteran after veteran got up and said how they had served in the past and apologized if it was not in hostile areas. The intent was to build credibility in commenting on this individual. The intended outcome of the testimony, Oh, he is one of us! and he gets a pass. The past “glory days” do not count when it comes to misappropriating funds and neither does what you did presently for veterans.
In the end, I would rather have my friends back. Of the 9,087,000 military personnel who served on active duty during the Vietnam Era Aug. 5, 1964-May 7, 1975, 1,728,344 of us were draftees. 3,403,100 (including 514,300 offshore) of us served in the Southeast Asia Theater (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, flight crews based in Thailand, and sailors in adjacent South China Sea waters). http://history-world.org/vietnam_war_statistics.htm
Richard Blumenthal served in the military during that era and he like many others during that period of time always faced the risk of being shipped to hostile areas, being hurt unintentionally where ever he was stationed, or being hurt intentionally while in the US. By intentionally, I mean, drinking the benzene tainted water at Camp Lejeune, being exposed to Uranium depleted artillery rounds during arty shoots, etc. Trump’s comment is BS. If you served during that time period you are one of us.
The Koch sponsored Concerned Veterans of America is also pushing for this. In the mean time, two companies which were charged with making those appointments have been charging $300 per appointment to make those appointments without giving 1 penny of care to veterans or what we would call administrative. Eventually what will happen is the VA will die a death of a thousand cuts and veterans will lose in the end.
Sorry, you are wrong. I watched the Hearing and Esquire + EM are right. AOC did a great job of continuing one lead in by a DEM and produced more information from Cohen. There was no comeback by Repubs, only personal attacks. Trump’s lackeys as many as there are, are too afraid of him.
No one wants your embarrassment. And no one recognizes you as being a part of or even a centrist of the Democrats. You are in a matter of convenience, convenience in that you can now say many things which would not have been said before or acceptable if Trump had not existed. But for the lies promulgated in attacks on legitimate candidates, you exist without which you would have no basis. “You listened to the sound bytes.” No, you did not. You are making it up as usual just to provoke a reaction. Well, you got mine. Go away.
I am almost willing to watch this incredible clusterf!ck that will be televised today. But I just cannot stand the idea of how the Reps will stop any kind of actual inquiry happen(think Lindsay Graham’s performance at the Kavanaugh hearings).
Meanwhile, Anderson Cooper sums it up best:
“A known liar who lied for another known liar because the liar told him to lie and paid him to lie.”
I know I don’t trust Cohen at all, if I trust him more than Trump, but his pre testimony leak is instructive:
“He is a racist.
He is a conman.
He is a cheat”
Cannot talk about the other claims(until there is documentation of some relevant information to confirm them, but on these three I can.
They are all true. There are literally decades of actual, undeniable facts that show trump is all of those things.
And he is the potus. Beyond fen depressing.
Been listening to his comments a few minutes at a time
EMike,
I am impressed!
debarred lawyer, innumerable perjuries, convicted felon reporting for jail in May, democrats’ disdainful line of questioning rehashed the disproved media soundbites that have not worked since July 16…………
all that affirms your beliefs?
Wow.
The Republican Party Completely and Utterly Disgraced Itself at Michael Cohen’s Hearing
The questioning from these products of the conservative bubble world was so bad it made a career hoodlum look good.
By Charles P. Pierce
Feb 27, 2019
“I mention this bit of history only to illustrate how utterly and completely the Republican Party disgraced itself on Wednesday when Michael Cohen, the current president*’s former king fixer, sat before the House Oversight Committee to describe some of the garish and baroque offenses against the law and the republic committed by Donald Trump. There was not a single Railsback to be found. Not one Republican asked a question about the specific offenses that Cohen had illuminated in his opening statement…..
This was a vivid look into the chronic ward of the prion disease that has eaten away the higher functions of American conservatism—and, thus, those of the Republican Party as well—since Ronald Reagan first served up the monkey brains almost 40 years ago. These are the complete creatures of the talk-show culture, the perfect products of two and three generations of gerrymandered in-breeding. These are the monsters from inside The Bubble. You could see this moment coming during the Obama years, in which the country returned the two worst Congresses in American history, full to the gunwales with Bible-banging crazy people. Sooner or later, this was going to be all that was left, and it was going to have to confront a serious crisis with unserious people. That’s what Wednesday was about.
As for Cohen, he gave as good as he got, and it was easy to forget for a moment what a bought-and-paid-for hoodlum he’d always been. He did the contrition dance deftly and, by and large, managed to stay cool under Meadows’s provocation and Jordan’s idiocies. He even did a better job debunking some of the alleged Trump misdeeds—love-children, the mysterious meeting in Prague—than the Republicans on the commitee bothered to do. There was something about him that yearned for the old days when he was sitting around Trump Tower with the boss, paying off porn stars and threatening high-school records offices. It would have been poignant if it wasn’t all as sordid as the worst brothel on the Singapore docks.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26558985/republicans-michael-cohen-hearing-disgrace-trump/
Susan Glasser Donald Trump went to Vietnam and Michael Cohen Made It Hell, New Yorker tidbit:
“During his testimony to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, on Wednesday, Michael Cohen raised his bushy eyebrows and nodded emphatically as he read out the damning particulars of yet another alleged lie that Donald Trump has told the American people. The President, Cohen said in his opening statement, had admitted to him that his decades-old story about why he did not serve in the Vietnam War was false, revealing that he had never had bone-spur surgery, as he claimed in order to receive a medical deferment. The disclosure from Trump came during the 2016 campaign, when Cohen’s job was to shut down the bad press coverage of Trump’s dubious explanation for why he had not served in Vietnam.
‘You think I’m stupid?‘ Cohen recalled Trump telling him. ‘I wasn’t going to Vietnam.‘
Amid Cohen’s many sensational claims of criminal wrongdoing by the President, it was perhaps understandable that this one Trump lie of many did not dominate the headlines. In seven hours of testimony, Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer testified that the President had paid hush money to cover up an affair with a porn star and produced signed checks to prove it; that he had known in advance about the WikiLeaks dump of hacked Democratic e-mails during the 2016 campaign; that he had engaged in a wide array of questionable and possibly illegal business practices; and that he had lied to the public about doing business in Russia throughout his race for the Presidency. With so much alleged wrongdoing to contemplate, Cohen’s claim that Trump was both a Vietnam draft dodger and an inveterate liar about it was almost a throwaway.
Yet Cohen disclosed this on a day when Trump was actually in Vietnam, having travelled there to broker a breakthrough deal on nuclear disarmament with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un.
‘I find it ironic,’ Cohen said in his testimony, addressing the former boss he once promised to take a bullet for, ‘that you are in Vietnam right now.’
Ironic is one word for it; incredible is another. Earlier that morning, Trump had offered a rich example of his you-can’t-make-this-up Presidency. Sitting in his Hanoi hotel room before going to one of the most important negotiating sessions of his Presidency, Trump took the time to preëmpt Cohen’s Vietnam-draft-dodger allegation with an attack of his own, Twitter-taunting the Connecticut Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal (‘Da Nang Dick,’ in Trumpspeak) as a Vietnam ‘total fraud,’ because he has been accused of misrepresenting his service record. ‘I have now spent more time in Vietnam’ than Blumenthal, Trump tweeted. Some days, Trump is so brazen it is breathtaking. Wednesday was one of those days.
By Thursday morning, however, it was clear that no amount of Trump bluster or deflection could obscure the twin disasters of the last twenty-four hours. Trump had finally gone to Vietnam, and lost the battle, if not the war. Back in Washington, the Cohen testimony had been a humiliation, the most public turning on a President by his lawyer since the White House counsel John Dean warned Richard Nixon, in 1973, that Watergate was a ‘cancer on the Presidency.’ One striking aspect of Cohen’s testimony was that Republican members of the House Oversight and Reform Committee chose not to argue with the substance of the allegations against Trump, in effect refusing to mount a defense of the President. Instead, they concentrated their questioning on matters designed to undercut the already suspect credibility of Cohen, who will soon go to prison for, among other things, lying to Congress. In Hanoi, meanwhile, the deal that Trump had hoped to cut with Kim failed to materialize—even the shameless flattery that Trump had lavished on the young dictator was insufficient to sway Kim from his demands for immediate sanctions relief while maintaining North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Trump had no choice but to leave Hanoi empty-handed.”
Does anyone here believe Cohen would lie again to Congress and risk getting a longer prison term? The liar was in Vietnam.
Trump does brings up a significant topic. During Vietnam and until the seventies, many of us were drafted. I sat and listened to a long clip of a Veterans Committee trying to decide who to elect to serve on it. One former member decided not to run. He had solicited a check in donation to the Veterans fund to be made out to him. His reasoning? He wanted to buy a plaque to be hung in the County Police Departments office honoring Veterans. The check was for $400 and the expenditure exceeded $500 (he paid the difference). In my book, typically in bylaws governing committees of this nature, and by law; this action is a misappropriation of funds regardless of intent. You may have a different opinion.
I was listening to this meeting intently as veteran after veteran got up and said how they had served in the past and apologized if it was not in hostile areas. The intent was to build credibility in commenting on this individual. The intended outcome of the testimony, Oh, he is one of us! and he gets a pass. The past “glory days” do not count when it comes to misappropriating funds and neither does what you did presently for veterans.
In the end, I would rather have my friends back. Of the 9,087,000 military personnel who served on active duty during the Vietnam Era Aug. 5, 1964-May 7, 1975, 1,728,344 of us were draftees. 3,403,100 (including 514,300 offshore) of us served in the Southeast Asia Theater (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, flight crews based in Thailand, and sailors in adjacent South China Sea waters). http://history-world.org/vietnam_war_statistics.htm
Richard Blumenthal served in the military during that era and he like many others during that period of time always faced the risk of being shipped to hostile areas, being hurt unintentionally where ever he was stationed, or being hurt intentionally while in the US. By intentionally, I mean, drinking the benzene tainted water at Camp Lejeune, being exposed to Uranium depleted artillery rounds during arty shoots, etc. Trump’s comment is BS. If you served during that time period you are one of us.
There is a move afoot to allow more veterans to use commercial healthcare. Trump had already signaled he would not fund this expansion of the VA into Commercial Healthcare which means it will draw on limited funding (Vietnam Veterans of America, NPR, and WaPo) https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-to-sign-veterans-heath-bill-as-white-house-works-against-plan-to-fund-it/2018/06/06/1763ac70-68d9-11e8-bf8c-f9ed2e672adf_story.html?utm_term=.d556e7bd2a3a
The Koch sponsored Concerned Veterans of America is also pushing for this. In the mean time, two companies which were charged with making those appointments have been charging $300 per appointment to make those appointments without giving 1 penny of care to veterans or what we would call administrative. Eventually what will happen is the VA will die a death of a thousand cuts and veterans will lose in the end.
affirmation for dems
from esquire rag
get real!
ilsm:
Sorry, you are wrong. I watched the Hearing and Esquire + EM are right. AOC did a great job of continuing one lead in by a DEM and produced more information from Cohen. There was no comeback by Repubs, only personal attacks. Trump’s lackeys as many as there are, are too afraid of him.
I listened to the sound bites…….
I would be embarrassed for the democrats.
But for their performance in the 2016 cycle set the sorry state of the regime.
Judgement is everything.
ilsm:
No one wants your embarrassment. And no one recognizes you as being a part of or even a centrist of the Democrats. You are in a matter of convenience, convenience in that you can now say many things which would not have been said before or acceptable if Trump had not existed. But for the lies promulgated in attacks on legitimate candidates, you exist without which you would have no basis. “You listened to the sound bytes.” No, you did not. You are making it up as usual just to provoke a reaction. Well, you got mine. Go away.
not a democrat
not a republican.
I post what I know
I will not go away
you react badly