Freak Out Friday – August 24, 2018

Well, well, well. Been quite the week for Trump. His continued howls of “witch hunt” were crushed on Tuesday, because the definition of a witch hunt is that innocent people suffer as mob hysteria sets in and seeks justice for imagined offenses. But four days ago the verdict came back in the Paul Manafort trial convicting him on eight of the eighteen offenses for which he was being tried (a single juror was the holdout on the remaining ten; possibly a Trump supporter, we don’t know.). Meanwhile, within minutes of that, Michael D. Cohen admitted under oath in open court that Trump instructed him to make payments hushing up his affair with Stormy Daniels in order to influence the election.

Once again we are hearing the oldest refrain in the world: the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency.

Once again we get to watch as the GOP, who would already be halfway through impeachment proceedings if this were Hillary Clinton covering up her affair with a male pørņ star, will continue to enable their guy to act as if the laws of the land do not apply to him. His opponents are either dying (sorry, McCain, for ever thinking poorly of you) or getting out of politics rather than be faced with Trump stoking hatred against them through his millions of idiot supports that believe every word he tweets.

1). The Don. Reading Trump’s tweet messages regarding Manafort and Cohen can become an exercise in insanity if you still have any hope that Trump will ever start acting like a President. He praises the convicted felon for “not flipping.” In other words, like any good Mafioso lieutenant, Manafort places loyalty to the Don above loyalty to his own family, perhaps hoping that Trump will pardon him in the near future…which Trump will absolutely do. Meanwhile Cohen openly admits to wrong doing and condemns the man who instructed him to do it. Why? Because he values his family’s needs over those of Trump to not be held accountable. Naturally the man who swore on a bible to uphold those laws condemns Cohen for violating his oath of loyalty. The man who swore he’d take a bullet for Trump is now the one holding the gun, and all Trump can do is condemn him as being a lousy lawyer. Hey Don, YOU’RE the one for whom he worked for over a decade. So what does that say about you?

In all, five of Trump’s associates have either been convicted or pleaded guilty to various crimes. Not only has Trump not drained the swamp, he’s restocked it with alligators.

2). I don’t know how you can impeach someone who’s done a great job. . That is a direct quote from Trump when he was asked about the possibilities of impeachment in respect to Cohen’s sworn statement that Trump violated campaign finance laws. Since he doesn’t know, I will answer him, leaving aside the whole notion of his self-proclaimed “great job.” Impeachment isn’t a job revue. They don’t run one every year and determine if you should get a gold star. You get impeached if you’ve broken the law. Trump broke the law. He is listed as an unindicted co-conspirator, which is what Nixon was described as in the Watergate burglary. And if Nixon hadn’t resigned, he would have been impeached, without question.

3). Does he even remember HE hired him?. Look, I have to admit I’m not a fan of Jeff Sessions. The guy’s a dìçk. But Trump’s ceaseless attacks on his appointed legal representative is way beyond the point of absurdity. He’s furious because the justice department is rounding up, prosecuting and convicting associates of his and keeps insisting that Sessions shift his focus onto people he, Trump, doesn’t like. Seriously? Hillary’s emails still? Trump cannot wrap himself around the notion that investigating actions which helped him steal an election are of far greater interest than a dûmbášš non-scandal that helped Clinton lose an election. His endless bìŧçhìņg about Sessions just makes him sound more and more guilty with every tweet. Sessions, in a rare outburst, fired back at his boss, defending himself and the justice department. Naturally all that did was ramp him up. How dare Sessions doesn’t just shut up and take it. What’s wrong with him/

4). Here’s how I think this will end: . Trump will fire Mueller. That is simply inevitable. Thus far he’s been following the advice of everyone telling him that firing Mueller would be a catastrophic move. But all that’s happened as he’s refrained from doing what he wants is that Mueller keeps rounding up his followers and advisors, most of whom turn on Trump. At some point he’s going to declare enough is enough, and when he fires Mueller , that is finally going to spur the House and Senate to do their dámņëd jobs, especially if it happens before the November elections. His inevitable firing of Sessions won’t have quite the same impact, but dumping Mueller will be a dead on comparison to Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre. Whatever day it is, it’ll be that night’s Massacre (much as any conspiracy has the word “gate” attached to it, which remains weird because “gate” was part of the Watergate hotel’s name, not an arbitrary suffix.). When he fires Mueller, the House and Senate is going to have to reach across the aisle and say “Enough is enough.” Because although the hardcore Trumpites will take no issue with it since they’ve bought into the whole “witch hunt” calumnies, they are not the majority of the voters. Better to pìšš øff them than the millions more voters who are going to want their representatives to take action. They recognize the Cosa Nostra attitudes of Don Trump and realize that these are not things a President should be spouting, or even believing.

But even so, it will likely only happen if Democrats take the majority at the mid-terms. So go out and vote. And double check that you are registered; far too many places are finding means to purge voter rolls without bothering to inform the purged voters.

PAD

14 comments on “Freak Out Friday – August 24, 2018

  1. And this morning it came out that Allen Weisselberg was given immunity to testify on matters related to Cohen and possibly more.
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    I would say Trump started çráppìņg himself when that news broke, but after the week he’s had there likely isn’t anything left in his bowels to mess his pants with at this point.

    1. Yeah, the Weisselberg news isn’t getting enough exposure, IMO. This is a guy who almost certainly knows where all the bodies are buried (maybe literally), and who probably helped bury some of them. If he fully turns, this might even peel off a bit of the base. (Pipe dream, I know, but I need *some* hope here.)

  2. Thank you so much for putting the image of Hillary Clinton with a pørņ star in my brain. Thank you. So much.

  3. I keep expecting to wake up and see that Sessions has gotten tired of the Don and decided to do what he was told and pick up the investigative reins…
    And ride them on the impeachment train as he turns over every little dark corner of the Trump empire.
    Trump keeps forgetting that every single person who has rolled on him were people he has thrown under the bus like he’s trying to do with Sessions.

  4. It’s come to my attention that Trump is finally going to build that wall like he promised after sh*tting all those bricks over the past few days.

  5. Peter David: His continued howls of “witch hunt” were crushed on Tuesday…
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    Luigi Novi: In what sense? He doesn’t care about the definition of the word, any more than he cares that modifying it by calling it “rigged” makes no sense. The point is to tell his cult of supporters what to believe, which is why he’ll likely continue to use the term, and they’ll likely continue to believe him, in which case those howls won’t really be “crushed”.

  6. What I don’t get is why his supporters continue to support him saying things like ‘They all lie,’ or ‘They’re all crooks.’ As if that makes it okay. It is definitely not okay and the longer it takes the people supposedly in charge of the checks and balances part of your government the more the rest of the world despairs of them ever waking up and doing their jobs.

  7. “When he fires Mueller, the House and Senate is going to have to reach across the aisle and say “Enough is enough.” Because although the hardcore Trumpites will take no issue with it since they’ve bought into the whole “witch hunt” calumnies, they are not the majority of the voters. Better to pìšš øff them than the millions more voters who are going to want their representatives to take action. They recognize the Cosa Nostra attitudes of Don Trump and realize that these are not things a President should be spouting, or even believing.”
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    But, you know what? The Republicans won’t do it. Not even then.
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    Why?
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    Because the Trump voter base is only partly the fringe nuts who came running to support the celebrity they saw on TV who told them to hate and blame all the people (especially the tan and brown ones) who they already hated and blamed for their failures. When all the votes were counted, Trump got more votes than the last Republican who ran for President.
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    The Trump supporters? That’s their regular base. That’s the Tea Party freaks of the last ten years and the extreme nut jobs who were filling their ranks starting with Newt’s revolution and going on into W’s time in office.
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    They’re not going against that, because, for them, their seats and power are more important than anything else, and they know that they will be primaried if they take that vote against Trump even if all it means is a new Republican President takes over before 2020’s election.
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    I remind everyone again, since I still see many people in many places talking about Nixon and the Republicans who did the right thing back then, that the Republicans who had to make that vote voted against the articles of impeachment.
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    And the Republicans in office now are even more sniveling than any generation of elected Republicans before them.
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    They will not do it.
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    And the Republican voters? They’ve made it clear already that they don’t care what Trump does. He can act like a criminal, he can bust the budget, he can be an embarrassing toddler on the world stage. So long as they get to lie to themselves about how awful the country was until we got “a real man” as President again and how Trump has turned it all around and finally gotten things moving blah blah blah blah…
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    Trump could literally go out and shot Cohen in the head in broad daylight and most of them would find some reason to excuse it and continue to support him. Hëll, they already want to allow him to have unchecked levels of power and authority that no President has had or should have, because they’re fine with Trump as King or Messiah.
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    They will not stop supporting him, and the cowards in Congress will not vote to impeach him.

    1. “When all the votes were counted, Trump got more votes than the last Republican who ran for President.”

      I’m not really sure what that means. The “last Republican who ran for President” got more votes than the PREVIOUS “last Republican who ran for President.” The thing is, though, the total number of people voting increased significantly over the previous election.

      In 2012, Mitt Romney got 60.993 million votes out of 129.085 million total cast; in 2008, John McCain got 59.948 million out of 131.314 million cast. (In 2012, Obama received 4 million fewer votes than he got in 2008. As there were 2 million fewer total votes overall, it’s reasonable to presume that the GOP’s increase was due more to disenchantment with Obama from “his” side.) And, as an overall percentage of the total vote, Trump got even fewer votes than the “previous Republican” (Romney had 47.2% of the total; Trump only got 46.1%).

      And, looking back historically, Dubya (way back in 2004) managed to get 62.04 million votes out of only 122.295 million cast. After 12 years, Trump only managed to get a mere 940 thousand more votes than Dubya, despite there being roughly 14.5 million more voters in 2016 compared to 2004.

      1. “’m not really sure what that means. The “last Republican who ran for President” got more votes than the PREVIOUS “last Republican who ran for President.” The thing is, though, the total number of people voting increased significantly over the previous election.”
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        It means what I said it means in the sentences that followed it.
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        “The Trump supporters? That’s their regular base. That’s the Tea Party freaks of the last ten years and the extreme nut jobs who were filling their ranks starting with Newt’s revolution and going on into W’s time in office.”
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        Did he bring in new voters that may not have voted in the last few presidential elections? Yes. But the vast majority of his support is the same old, same old Republican voter. And the Republicans in Congress are not going to do a dámņëd thing about Trump until there’s a metaphorical gun to their heads and they have absolutely no choice in the matter.

  8. We already know from interviews with the holdout that she’s a Trump supporter. I’d suggest looking them up, but I worry about your blood pressure.

  9. This is completely off topic, but I was wondering whether there will be a Scarlet Spider issue 26?

      1. Don’t let the President hear that. He’ll claim credit and tell everyone “see? I’m tough on Russia. I just got rid of a Red!”

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