Don't accuse me of merely playing dumb. Everyone here knows I am, actually, that dumb.
Trace the conversation back. I took issue with yet another this-be-treason spiel. Maybe some people enjoy the fever pitch of politics where every hot topic is the most important one ever and totally unprecedented, but some of us prefer signals that are undistorted. All this talk about damage is to put this in its proper context and scale.
The campaign probably solicited. That was probably illegal. Those people should go to jail. Russia should be considered hostile to the United States. Did I tick all your boxes, yet?
I honestly get where both of you are coming from on this whole treason semantics thing. I get the desire to not throw around highly loaded terms in politics without meeting an equally high bar, for a number of reasons, like diminishing the reputation of the word. Though one thing I’m not really worried about is it being some sort of slippery slope that will get colored and abused when it’s a Democrat, because that sort of thing will happen no matter what the left does. I also get what kingv is saying about the oxford letter of the term and how it probably would fit if this narrative of conspiracy, solicitation and quid pro quo turns out true. Which I am having a harder and harder time buying into any alternative hypothesis that explains all the facts and behavior we are continually seeing.
Though I will say on the fever pitch stuff, I have a totally opposite view. To me it is incredibly disheartening and worrisome the level of false equivocating, downplaying, and tolerance there has become for what is objectively an incredibly significant moment in American political history. There really is not a moment where you potentially had a this for that exchange involving illegal coordination and dissemination between a campaign for president and a hostile foreign nation, that is aiming to undermine our system of government, done in exchange for selling off part of our foreign policy. Where there is hyperbole it bothers me far less than those that frame this as just usual partisan politics.
