Month: November 2019

So the impeachment hearings have begun.  The GOP got what they wanted—public hearings—and naturally Trump is complaining about there being public hearings.  Because what he wants, what he believes, is that he should be above investigation.  His lawyer actually stood in a court of law and stated that if Trump gunned down a man on 5^th Avenue, he shouldn’t be able to be investigated.  Indeed, the next step in Trump’s incessant tax dodge is to try and bring it before the Supreme Court and see if his handpicked judges decide to overturn the 1970s court ruling that helped sink Nixon.

My guess?  They will. 

Because as far as Trump’s supporters are concerned, this country is no longer about the Constitution, no longer about serving the people, no longer about anything except aiding them in holding onto power and doing whatever they want to do.  That and demonizing Democrats, including blocking all the House’s efforts to pass laws and then accusing them of being the “do nothing” Democrats.  You know, not dissimilar from blaming a rape victim for dressing in a way that encouraged the crime.  Not identical, obviously, but the same spirit:  blame the people being abused for the actions of the criminal.

You know, kind of like what Trump is doing right now:  He’s on Twitter accusing Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch of being incompetent.  Of course he is.  That’s the way what we loosely refer to as his mind operates.  I’m sure that if Yovanovitch had a choice, she would be happy not to have to expose herself to this continuing butchery of her reputation.

Yet the GOP doesn’t seem to understand that, and they’re proving it as they continue to berate Adam Schiff for obviously changing his mind about calling the whistleblower.  The reason for his deciding not to do so is obvious:  Trump has stirred up his base, labelling the whistleblower a traitor and asserting that it’s a shame we’re not dealing with such a man in the way we did in the old days.  We know full well that there are people out there—mostly in Florida, it seems—who would be more than happy to carry out Trump’s wishes.  If the whistleblower were to go public, that would be the end of his life. Done.  He’d be signing a death warrant for himself and quite possibly for his family as well.  Plus everything he said has already been verified by other witnesses who were privy to the phone call, so exposing him to public view will accomplish nothing except put a time clock on how long he has to live.  But that doesn’t stop the GOP from incessantly hammering away.

Why?  Because they have no case.  But in a classic example of misdirection they continue to try and draw peoples’ attention away from this fact, even though Trump keeps making it difficult.  His timing of his tweet attacking Yovanovitch while she was testifying is just another case of proving that everyone who has ever worked for him has a reason to be afraid.  Sooner or later he’s going to turn on Rudy Giuliani, and it will be fascinating to see what Giuliani does then to assure his role of being “the hero.”

Meanwhile people keep comparing this entire business to Richard Nixon, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it is completely different.  Nixon, remember, put forward a veneer of civility and being presidential.  It was only the release of the audio tapes which betrayed a foul-mouthed Nixon plotting his cover up that served as a cold dash of water on America’s face.  They realized they were being lied to and their support of Nixon evaporated.

That’s not going to happen here.

People knew they were getting a lying dirtbag when they supported Trump.  Since being elected he has lied publicly over 13,000 times and yet he still enjoys support on his base.  Foul-mouthed?  Trump uses profanity on Twitter, at rallies, at speeches.  He’s normalized language that, if Obama used it, Congress would want to impeach him on that basis alone.  His crime of extorting the president øf Ùkráìņë?  He boasts that people should read the transcript, which PROVES THAT HE DID IT.  He doesn’t care.  His supporters don’t care.  They have checked out on the entire concept of the Constitution, of civility, of the law.  They’re too busy hating liberals to recognize what it is that Trump has done.  “Leave it to the voters,” they declare.  Right, because maybe they’re interested in seeing how many popular votes the Democrat can win by in the next election before the Electoral college goes to the GOP again.  

We need to face facts:  the GOP is not going to impeach Trump.  They have thrown out any hope that they may remember the Constitution that they are sworn to protect.  Instead they have sworn to protect the President and given up the notion that they are an equal branch to the Executive.  They are laying the groundwork for an imperial presidency which they will only regret once the Democrats are back in charge of the White House

Let’s pray that happens sooner rather than later.

PAD

FREAK OUT FRIDAY – NOVEMBER 1, 2019

As we all know, the House yesterday took the first vote on the path to impeachment.  It was not one they were constitutionally required to make, but the GOP has been relentlessly bìŧçhìņg over its absence and so the Democrats heeded the shouting and held it.  Which naturally prompted the GOP to continue its bìŧçhìņg by declaring that what was voted on wasn’t good enough.

Understand that the procedures the Democrats are pursing are the exact same ones that the GOP employed when they were going after Bill Clinton who dared to lie about a sexual encounter (as Trump has done repeatedly) and after Hillary Clinton for her noninvolvement in Benghazi.  But what was good enough for the GOP naturally no longer is, and so even though the vote they held affords more defensive opportunities for Trump than Nixon or Clinton had, they were still opposed to it.

That’s the thing I found most disturbing about the vote.  Except for a single vote by an independent who walked away from the GOP some months ago, the vote went straight down partisan lines.  A couple of Democrats voted “nay” because they represent districts that supported Trump, but the GOP remained in complete lockstep.

It was clear that they were sending a definite message, and the message was this:

You know how we swore that we were going to uphold the Constitution?  Yeah…not so much.

It has become indisputable that whether he was pressuring foreign leaders to interfere in the American election, striving to clear Putin of the indisputable charges that he helped Trump get elected, or ignoring the emoluments clause which he dismissed as “phony,” Trump does not give the slightest of dámņš about the Constitution that he swore to protect.  He is a money laundering, tax dodging, pussy grabbing narcissistic áššhølë, and yet the GOP has sent its message loud and clear:  He’s our guy and screw the Constitution.  They absolutely cannot deny the facts of his abuses of power, so instead they are ignoring them and focusing on the process.  They are endeavoring to paint this purely as the Democrats despising the outcome of the 2016 election and trying to overturn it, rather than publicly owning what they all know to be true:  Nancy Pelosi had no choice.  She had to activate the impeachment mechanism because Trump had made his violations indisputable.

The question is, why does the GOP continue to support him?  There are the obvious reasons, of course.  

1.  They are afraid of him.  They’ve seen how he heedlessly throws anyone who ceases to be of use to him under the bus, and no one wants to be next.
2. Power.  Remaining in power is all that matters.  They fear if they turn against him, they will lose their power and so they remain in lockstep.

But I’m afraid there’s a broader concern at stake.  The major problem is that despite the incessant revelations of his wrongdoing, his approval rating remains pretty much the same.  His base remains in place behind him.  

Why?  Why in God’s name does anyone who considers himself a voter, a patriot, an American, support this bootlicker of despots and murderous leaders?

Well, to begin with, most of them are racists.  I mean, let’s face the reality of it.  For most of his supporters, eight years of a black president was absolutely murderous.  These same people who currently claim that we should unite behind Trump because he’s president didn’t hesitate to accuse Obama of not being American, accuse his wife of not being a woman, heckling him at the State of the Union, etc.  Mitch McConnell swore that his priority was to make sure Obama was a one-term president, relentlessly blocked initiatives, and wouldn’t even let him appoint a Supreme Court justice (you just know that if a vacancy occurs in 2020, he’ll fast track Trump’s nomination even though it’s an election year, which was the excuse he came up with to block Obama’s nomination.).  

The problem is that having a strong black man running the country is threatening to many racists.  They are worried that they were seeing the erosion of white power, just as many Christians falsely claim America is turning against Christmas.  Trump was the reaction to that.   You can’t go wrong when you support someone whom David Duke is behind.  And whether Trump was busy being sued for disenfranchising black apartment dwellers, declaring Mexican immigrants were rapists and drug lords, or claiming that there were many fine people in the Nazi party, he has lived up to the expectations of the racists and White supremacists who put him in office.

Furthermore we are living in a different time from the Nixon administration.  Back in those days, Americans still had a sense of what this country was supposed to be about.  They understood that even when there were political disagreements, there was more that united us than divided us.  They believed in American ideals.

That has deteriorated. 

Part of it has been the GOP’s relentless assault on the voting rights of blacks and Hispanics.  Whether they’re gerrymandering districts, passing new laws that curtail voting rights, blocking new laws that protect voting rights, or depending on the archaic electoral college that has screwed two Democratic presidential candidates in this century, the GOP has encouraged division and rigged the system to support their candidates and beliefs.  

Another part has been both the rise of social media and right wing extremist venues ranging from Fox News to Breitbart.  In the old days they were limited to Rush Limbaugh spouting his lies on the radio, but now they’re everywhere, feeding endless misinformation into the open minds of credulous fools who reiterate right wing talking points without caring that they’re spewing lies from either right wing tools or Russian ‘bots.  

And their attitudes and personalities are laced with destructive cynicism.  So Trump has lied over thirteen thousand times.  So what?  All politicians lie.  It’s just that so many of them are so skilled at it that those dumb, retarded leftists can’t tell the difference.  But Trump is so bad at it that we know it’s lies and so can ignore it.  Besides, it’s not really lies because he believes what he says is true.  He genuinely believes that the three million people who preferred Hillary over him were fake voters.  He genuinely believes Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers.  He genuinely believes his impeachable phone call to Ukraine was “perfect”. So those aren’t lies; they’re subjective truths.

So they continue to believe in him and support him because they’re credulous suckers who cannot admit he’s bad news because they don’t believe he is.  The truth is that while impeachment is big news in DC and in states bordering oceans, the vast majority of the country doesn’t give the slightest of craps about it.  They think it’s just some show those dumb Democrats have come up with because they hate Trump.  The news that reports Trump’s misdeeds is fake, the process is biased, and it has nothing to do with their lives.  

And that’s why the impeachment effort is doomed to fail.  The rigidity of the GOP defense in the House has proven that.  The Senate is going to spin Trump’s misdeeds as no big deal, his defenders will ignore testimony that flies in the face of it, the impeachment vote will run along party lines as the GOP, when presented with the opportunity to do the right thing in fact won’t, and Trump will use the failure of the impeachment as “proof” that he did nothing wrong.  And if the Democrats can’t get their šhìŧ together and find a candidate who is basically bulletproof, we’re going to have four more years of Trump and by the time 2024 rolls around, assuming there is still a United States anymore, it’s going to be unrecognizable.

PAD