Month: September 2019

I’ve been through this before.

Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon had a fairly high approval rating and a solid support base. And then the combination of the Woodward and Bernstein stories, the widening of the Watergate investigation, and ultimately the release of the White House tapes that sank Nixon’s support and got him to resign rather than face certain impeachment. The Republican support evaporated as they sensed Nixon had become a hot-button issue and Nixon himself was smart enough to realize his cause was doomed. So he left.

I still remember being at a friend’s party the night that Nixon went on television and announced that he was resigning. We cheered. Best party of my high school career.

This generation is now seeing the exact same thing that I witnessed back in the 1970s: the beginning of the end of a presidency.

Yes, I know, that phrase has been used before when it comes to Trump. He has displayed an astounding ability to survive screw up after screw up, one treasonous act after another. With the combined support of Mitch McConnell and Trump’s blind, typically racist, uniformly stubborn core base, Trump has managed to withstand every accusation hurled at him using the same means: 1) denying it; 2) declaring other people are guilty of it; 3) attacking is accuser(s); 4) claiming the “fake media” is fostering yet another untrue story.

That’s not working this time.

Deep Whistle remains anonymous, so Trump’s accusations of his being a Democratic foil are more baseless than ever before. He can’t deny it; instead he admitted it and boasted about the notion that what he unethically did wasn’t unethical at all…and to add insult to injury, threw his Vice President under the bus with him, declaring that we should listen to Pence’s conversations as well, which you know Congress is now going to do. He’s reduced to lambasting the media for allegedly deliberately screwing up the punctuation of his tweets, even though his history of spelling and punctuation errors and grammatical mistakes is on the record and legendary (not to mention typically compared to Obama’s list of word-perfect tweets.).

The most significant development, of course, is that he’s pushed Nancy Pelosi off the bench and onto the playing field. For months she has resisted the notion of impeachment; now she’s all in. And there is no smarter politician out there than Pelosi, which means that if she’s on board, she knows there’s a case.

What’s pushed it to a whole new level is the news that the White House attempted to cover it up. As opposed to the president’s secretary erasing a tape, we have the transcript being tossed into classified storage that’s designed for matters of national security, not political convenience. So we have a Watergate level burglary and, even more significant, a Watergate level coverup.

So after receiving a score of instances of Trump’s impeachable offenses, the House has finally been pushed into doing exactly what they are supposed to do. They are undertaking their constitutional obligation to oversee the executive branch and not allow fear of his tweets or accusations of his followers to deter them from doing what must be done.

And Trump, who is far more stupid than Nixon, has not yet realized that things have changed. That the end has begun. Instead he has declared that Deep Whistle is a spy…which he likely is since he works for the CIA, but he’s a patriotic spy who works for this country. And just as he declared that the innocent guys who were arrested for the assault on the Central Park jogger should have been executed, he has declared that Deep Whistle should be charged with treason and likewise executed.

Because that is one of the most common tactics of an abuser. When he is accused of an action, it is his habit to state that his accusers are the true criminals. So naturally when Trump is accused of treason–which he has in fact committed–his tactic is to turn around and claim that his accuser is the real traitor. Which is absurd, but that won’t deter him.

The fact is that Deep Whistle is a patriot. He saw the chief executive abusing his power and availed himself of the legally mandated avenues available to him. And when Trump goes down, he’s dragging Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani and Mike Pence with him.

And he is going down. I know, I know, there have been many times in the past two years where it seemed that he had crossed the line. But his delays and obfuscations and stone walling have always outlasted the news cycle and people have moved on to something else. I don’t think that’s going to happen this time. It just feels too similar to Nixon this time.

And when he goes, I sure hope he takes plenty of company along.

PAD

FREAK OUT FRIDAY – SEPTEMBER 20, 2019

We all know of the legendary Deep Throat.  No, not the Linda Lovelace one.  I’m referring to former FBI associate director Mark Felt, who fed information to the equally legendary Woodward and Bernstein that helped bring down the Nixon presidency.

And now we apparently have Deep Throat II:  Deep Whistle.  Deep Whistle is an unnamed member of the intelligence community who was so alarmed with conversations that Trump had with an unnamed foreign leader—including very disturbing promises—that he decided to make it known.  Naturally a coterie of Trump’s supporters/enablers/toadies endeavored to keep it bottled up.

Meanwhile—and I’m a little fuzzy on whether this is the same story or one that coincides with this one—word has gotten out that Trump has been endeavoring to strong arm Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of the Ukraine.  Why and how has he been doing that?  The how was by threatening to withhold financial aid to the Ukraine, which was finally released a week after the story was broken in the media. The why is even more problematic. He insisted that he wanted Zelensky to launch an investigation into Joe Biden’s son and his involvement with a Ukranian natural gas company.

Because of course when you feel threatened by a political opponent, you don’t try to face off against him on issues of merit.  You don’t try to argue with him.  You belittle him, call him demeaning names (while simultaneously talking about how much you respect him and other adversaries like “Pocahantas.”) And when that doesn’t work and he remains strong in the polls, you don’t raise your game.  Instead you try to strong-arm another national leader to try and dig up dirt on Biden’s son.  Because the reasoning is very simple:  Smear your competitor by smearing his family.  

Is there proof that the son has done anything illegal?  No.  Even more important, is there proof that the father colluded somehow with him and therefore has done something illegal?  Like, you know, falsifying a government weather map, which is a crime punishable by ninety days in jail?  No, of course not.

But since when has Trump been the slightest bit interested in facts?  He dismisses reportage from the most reliable news sources in the country as “fake news.”  He sides with the Saudi Prince who engineered the murder and butchering of a Washington Post report, dismisses climate change as a hoax, insists that the intelligence community is completely wrong about Russia rigging the election for his benefit, claims that he won the popular vote because the three million more voters who wanted Hillary were all illegal immigrants, and paints a portrait of Mexicans that may be solidly supported by the makers of Rambo: Last Blood but not by others (including me, who has been to Mexico several times and had a great time every outing.)  

Combine his threats to withhold money from the Ukraine unless they do what he demanded and his promises to an unnamed foreign head (probably Putin) and we have yet more proof that Trump is interested in one thing and one thing only:  himself.  The best was when he endeavored to dismiss the facts of his unspecified call by declaring that, knowing the phone call would be tapped, how could anyone think he’d possibly be stupid enough to say something disturbing/treasonous? 

That’s actually a fairly reasonable question.  I shall endeavor to answer it to the best of my ability.

We think he’d be stupid enough to say something disturbing/treasonous because he is stupid enough to do such a thing.  I fully believe he’s capable of saying something along those lines without even realizing that’s what he’s doing.  

Because that’s what he does, all the time.  Says and does stupid things, and then he has Mitch McConnell and his passel of followers laboring 24/7 to either try and cover it up or make sure that he never suffers consequences for his actions.  And so far, it’s been working like a charm.  He can’t hold a thought in his head for more than seconds at a time.  

Over the past two and a half years, we have been pushed toward the ineluctable conclusion that Trump was everything the Founding Fathers feared could go wrong with the presidency.  He’s why we have the language about impeachment.  The Emoluments clause.  The 25^thamendment.  All the safeguards that were built into the document he swore to uphold, all of which are being ignored by people who are far more worried about preserving power than serving the electorate.

The fact is this: Trump is the single most destructive, lying individual who has ever inhabited the Oval Office.  And the GOP controlled Senate continues to cover for him over and over again.  They remain the reason that the Democrats are only half-heartedly pursuing impeachment.  They know that the GOP will shut it down should it get that far and Trump will use it to declare triumph, and unfortunately this will work with his stupid supporters.  

HAS HE DONE ANYTHING RIGHT?  Yes, although mostly it’s him trying to undo damage that he himself did.  He has lifted tariffs on 437 Chinese products, mostly because of pleas from US companies claiming that the tariffs will cause economic hardship.  So although our relationship with China is still a mess, at least he’s doing something to try and undo the massive snarl he created.  So that’s something.  Not much, but something.

PAD

People screw up. They just do.

No one goes through their life without making mistakes.  It is part of the human condition.  I’ve made some whoppers in my time, and so have you.  And when you make a mistake, what you are supposed to do is admit the mistake, apologize if necessary, and move on.  Unfortunately we live in a world where doing so frequently isn’t enough.  If you screw up and apologize, there will always be those who refuse to accept it.  Who will feel that an apology doesn’t suffice for the depth of your error and instead you must be punished into oblivion:  fired from your job and shunned by all right thinking people until ideally you kill yourself.  So the fact is that our current environment doesn’t make apologizing the easiest thing to do.

But sometimes that’s what you have to do.  Admit you messed up and move on.

However if you have an extremely fragile ego, that presents a different problem.  A fragile ego will preclude the ability to admit that you were wrong.  You are literally incapable of saying, “Whoops.  My bad.”  Instead you will do anything to avoid it.  You will lie.  You will urge others to lie.  You will break the law.  You will warp reality, bend it to your will in order to force it to comply with the world as you are restructuring it.

This is why so many people have been wrongly convicted and sent to jail, some to death row, on mistaken eyewitness testimony.  Fortunately enough the rise of DNA evidence has cleared the records of some wrongly convicted felons, even saving them from death.

And yet people with fragile egos whose wrong testimony put them in jail will oftentimes refuse to admit they were wrong.  They won’t say the reasonable thing:  “Thank God science caught my error.”  No, they will insist that they were right.  That the DNA evidence isn’t reliable.  That someone else in the chain of testimony screwed up  Something, anything went wrong but they themselves were correct.

That is what we have from the current resident of the Oval Office.

I know of one time when he admitted he was wrong:  In 2016 when he copped to the fact that Barack Obama was a US citizen, after he had ridden his racist I-Doubt-It to the GOP nomination.  

He has never admitted that the alleged muggers of the Central Park jogger, whom he asserted should receive the death penalty, were innocent.  He has never admitted there were not thousands of Muslims celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers.  He has not admitted any of the thousands upon thousands of lies that he has foisted upon his followers, who blindly accept everything he says as true.  Or at least no worse than any other mistruths that have been spoken by other politicians.

His most recent screw up however, may well have set a new record for stupidity and subsequent ramifications.

It began, naturally enough, with a tweet.  He stated that Alabama was one of the states in danger from hurricane Dorian. Which it had been….several days earlier.  By the time he tweeted about it, though, Alabama was safe.  His posting alarmed residents of Alabama and the weather bureau corrected him twenty minutes later.  If he’d done a subsequent tweet thanking the bureau for stepping in, that would have been that.  It wouldn’t even have made mention on Colbert.

But because his ego is so fragile that he cannot admit when he is wrong, he had to double down and triple down.  He even went so far as to remodel a weather map with a sharpie to include a small piece of Alabama in the hurricane’s projected path, which is—by the way—a crime.  And then claim that he had no idea how the map got marked up. And then order his people to threaten to fire any meteorologists who said he was wrong.  And then deny ordering them to do that.  

And when any of his lies are pointed out to him, he claims that they are false stories planted by the “fake news” media to make him look bad.

Meanwhile under his direction the EPA continues to roll back environmental safeguards installed by the Obama administration.  It’s hard to say whether he’s doing it because it suits the will of big business and makes other millionaires/billionaires happy, or whether it’s just because he likes to do away with anything that Obama did. It’s really rather impressive. Anyone who declared that Obama didn’t accomplish anything during his administration is certainly seeing the lie put to that assertion.  He accomplished so much that it’s taken Trump several years to undo much of it. 

There is one thing that has become abundantly clear:  

Trump is insane.

That may be overstating it.  Not raving psychotic insane.  Rather he is a low-ego narcissist whose word cannot be trusted.  Who sides with despots over allies.  Who ignores the warnings of the intelligence agencies. Who owes a debt to Russia for screwing with the election that placed him in office.  Who profiteers at every opportunity, whether he is having his vice president stay in his Ireland hotel (and then denying it was his suggestion) or having $30K parties at another of his establishments, or accepting money from foreign dignitaries staying at his DC hotels.  He is, in every sense, a traitor to this country, as is any member of the GOP who continues to support him.  

And yet despite his repeated breaking of the law, the Democrats still refuse to impeach him. It’s still considered the third rail of the election.  Why impeach him when the 2020 election will get rid of him, certainly. Because between the Electoral college and Russian hacking, we can definitely count on that, right?

As of this point, he should be impeached because he’s broken the law repeatedly, and impeachment exists specifically for that reason.  We all know that if we were laying the specifics of this situation out to any of the Founding Fathers, it would be a no brainer for them.

Why isn’t it for us?PAD