Month: January 2020

The comic book series “Watchmen” endeavored to portray a more “realistic” world of superheroes than other comics.  Yes, there was a blue, superpowered individual created through freakish scientific means, and there was a tentacled genetic monster at the climax (it’s more than thirty years old, so screw the whole “spoiler” thing) but otherwise it was about normal people who put on costumes and attempted to do either great good or great evil.  

There was one major change in the universe in which “Watchmen” existed that differentiated it from ours, aside from Dr. Manhattan.  That was that Richard Nixon was still president.  

I remember reading “Watchmen” when it first came out and for some reason I had real trouble swallowing that.  All the other stuff about superheroes and villains, about Rorschach and Night Owl and his ship, that I was able to believe because I was a long-time comic fan.  I was used to such tropes as the insane superhero and the technologically advanced crusader.  But how in the world, I thought, could Nixon still be president?  He had indisputably done impeachable things, and if he hadn’t resigned, he’d have been thrown out by the Senate.  Instead he was still in office, which should be impossible because a president has two terms, max.  Nixon’s presence as chief executive really didn’t make any sense.

And now, here we are, more than three decades later, and we still don’t have giant blue supermen or genetic constructs.  But we do have the exact situation that would have assured Nixon a continued presidency.

Because it is becoming inevitably clear that the Senate is going to clear Trump.

Alan Dershowitz, who used to be a respected lawyer, actually had the nerve this week to argue that anything the president does, if he believes his reelection is in the public good, is acceptable.  He is contending that the punishment does not fit the crime; that indeed, there wasn’t a crime despite the fact that the Government Accountability Office said that there indeed was a crime.  That Trump’s withholding of the aid to Ukraine without informing Congress was flat-out illegal.  To say nothing of the fact that it’s already established that a crime does not have to have been committed for impeachment to occur.  If Trump decided to take a six month vacation to Mar-A-Largo, technically that’s not a crime, but it would certainly be an impeachable offense.  Even Dershowitz himself, back in the 90s, stated that a crime did not have to have been committed for a president to be impeached.  Which of course is what he said, because it involved Clinton.  If Clinton or Obama had done what Trump did, they’d have been out on the street.

Instead the GOP is lining up to stand behind Trump in a way they never did behind Nixon.  Back in the 1970s, the Constitution and public opinion mattered.  Now the majority of the public wants to hear from witnesses, particularly John Bolton, whose book I have no doubt Trump will find a way to quash.  Simon & Schuster had best be prepared for a lengthy lawsuit because that’s how Trump handles everything.  They will state the book can’t be published, end statement, and they will be perfectly willing to drag it into the courts where it will take years to resolve.  The book won’t see print until after Trump is out of office.

Presuming he ever is.  Because remember, the “Watchmen” Nixon had an extended term.  And Trump has been repeatedly saying that he should be eligible for a third term.  Of course he constantly says he’s joking, but “joking” about things is how Trump normalizes insane things before he tries them out for real.  He certainly has supporters who assert that he is “due” a third term because of how the FBI and the Democrats ostensibly wasted his entire first term.  Never mind that the Constitution expressly forbids it.  It also expressly forbids the sort of profiteering that he is doing, such as charging millions in taxpayer dollars every time he goes off to play golf at a resort that makes money off it.  He has been violating the Constitution since pretty much day one of his presidency, and he has the GOP so cowed that none of them dare stand up to him.  Hëll, even the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who many believe could unilaterally decide to call witnesses, seems to be too afraid to do anything to take an active role.

If the Senate we have now had existed back in the 1970s, Nixon would never have been forced to resign.  They’d have lined up dutifully behind him and supported his presidency and who knows?  If he had declared a state of emergency and lobbied for a third term…

Well, if Trump did it, what do you think the GOP would do?

I mean, seriously.  Could you imagine these guys, who have absolutely given up on their vow to support the Constitution, actively employing it to prevent him from doing so?  

What if—and I’m just spitballing here—what if the Iranians take over an airplane and crash it into the Empire State Building on September 11?  

That evening, Trump goes on TV:  “After consulting with my attorneys, I am declaring a state of national emergency and suspending the November elections until our war with Iran is concluded.”  

Will the GOP override him?

Of course not. 

Will the Democrats stand up to him?  And what?  Get tagged as being unpatriotic in a time of war?  Prevent him from going to war just as they failed to do with W?

Of course not.

And we have the “Watchmen” Nixon in office.

It’s just that easy.

And now that I’ve said it, you’re going to sit there and go, “Holy crap, he’s right.”  

Because that’s what happens when you erode the Constitution.  A dictatorship doesn’t happen all at once.  It occurs by degrees, one chipped away piece at a time.  Trump declared the emoluments clause as being “phony.”  How much effort would it be for him to declare that the 22^nd amendment is “old,” “out of date,” “short-sighted?”  “Phony?”

None.  None whatsoever.

Because that is the situation that we are in right now.  The GOP is bending over backwards to accommodate Trump and brush aside the document that was created not only to govern our country, but to save us from exactly the sort of man that Trump is.  From urging foreign interference (“Russia, if you’re listening”) to hinging aid on personal services (“I’d like you to do us a favor”) to lining his own pocket with taxpayer and foreign dollars, he is precisely what they were afraid of.  He is who the impeachment process was created for.

Unfortunately, we are now seeing the one vulnerability in the system:  It depended upon people who would take it seriously to follow it.

That is not the current GOP. 

It used to be that the main difference between the Democrats and Republicans was viewing how government should operate.  That is no longer the case.  Instead the disparity is believing in IF the government should operate.  Should it do what it is designed to do, or should it defer entirely to the whims and intentions, the threats and the belligerence, of the chief executive.  As far as the GOP is concerned, the answer is clearly the latter.

And who watches them?

We do.  And we despise what we’re seeing.

PAD

We could open with the impeachment, of course, but just to be different. Let’s check out the environment.

Donald AntiChrist Trump, as part of his ongoing war on Mother Nature, undid yet another environmental law, bringing it to nearly one hundred instances of doing so.  This time he disposed of Obama’s Waters of the United States rule, removing protection for an assortment of streams and wetlands.  “This was a rule that basically took your property away from you,” said the same president who is embroiled in a series of court cases raised by people whose land he is endeavoring to take away so he can build an unnecessary wall along the US/Mexico border. 

According to the New York Times, “The new water rule for the first time in decades allow landowners and property developers to dump pollutants such as pesticides and fertilizers directly into hundreds of thousands of waterways, and to destroy or fill in wetlands for construction projects.”

His claim is that the abatement of the rule will help farmers, and yet his various trade policies have driven many farmers into bankruptcy, so he obviously doesn’t give the slightest of dámņš about them.  Instead the ones who benefit most from it are real estate developers.

Basically his elimination of the law will put bodies of water at risk that have been protected since the 1970s and 1980s.  It’s insane.  But then again, so is he.

This is how insane he is:  At the same time that he is being impeached for obstructing justice, he boasted in a press conference a couple of days ago that “But honestly, we have all the material. They don’t have the material.”  He flat out stated as a fact exactly what he is being impeached over.  That is how confident he is that he will be cleared.  He knows that he can say anything, do anything, and never be held accountable for it.  Why shouldn’t he feel that way?  He’s lived his entire life that way.  Whenever he’s gotten into trouble, he either bought his way out of it or bullied his way out of it.

Which is exactly what he’s doing this time as well.  He’s donated money to various senators, and he has used Twitter to relentlessly attack anyone who even thinks of standing up to him.

In the face of that, the Democrats’ presentation of their case has been masterful.  Adam Schiff and his people have been meticulous, detailed, and unrelenting as, aided by TV screens on which they are able to run videos of testimony from the House investigations, they have laid a thorough groundwork that would prove their case to anyone with a clear, rational mind.

Which of course doesn’t include the Republicans who have remained in lockstep to their opposition.  They have had the unmitigated nerve to dismiss the Democrats as presenting “nothing new” after having spent the first few days of the impeachment blocking the Democrats, again and again, from bringing in new testimony.  Meanwhile Trump’s lawyers have relentlessly lied.  They asserted that the GOP was precluded from being involved in closed-door investigation even though there were, in fact, Republicans present and asking questions.  They claimed that Trump and his lawyers were forbidden from getting involved, when the President and his lawyers were actually invited to do exactly that and refused.  

The indisputable truth is that the GOP is terrified of witnesses.  They know that people like John Bolton would present truth, and the GOP is firmly in opposition to truth.  They want to keep the country in its bubble of conservativism, and so they walk out of the Senate chamber in violation of rules, or read books, or do crossword puzzles, or fall asleep.  I want you to imagine a juror in any actual trial sitting there nodding off or reading a book during testimony.  Imagine what the judge would do to them.  Imagine a juror trying to just leave the courtroom because he was bored.  I wonder how bored he would be when he was thrown in jail.

The only way it seems that they will allow witnesses is if they managed to get something in return:  Hunter Biden.  This would be a massive mistake.  Forcing Biden to testify would give Trump everything he wants, because no one will remember anything he says, any more than anyone can quote anything Hillary said when testifying about Benghazi.  All they will remember is that he was grilled by the Senate, who will say the words “Corruption” and “your father” as many times as possible to make those stick in the American consciousness.  And when the Senate clears Trump, he will then be able to go out and boast about how Hunter and Joe Biden are being investigated for corruption while he, Trump, is vindicated and clean as a whistle.  So no, Hunter Biden—who has zero personal knowledge of anything Trump did and is therefore irrelevant to the proceedings, should not testify under any circumstance.

I hope to God that the Senate’s actions, their indifference, their flat out refusal to do their job, manages to penetrate the conservative bubbles of the idiot voters who put them in place and make them realize they must, must, MUST be voted out of office.  This November may well be our last chance to save the Republic and if we fail, I truly dread the future of this country.

PAD

Pens.

That’s what it’s come down to.  That is how desperate the GOP has become.  They’re obsessing about pens.

They are endeavoring to get huge mileage out of the fact that when Nancy Pelosi signed the impeachment documentation, she used multiple pens.

The fact that Trump has spent over $100 million dollars on golf trips, enriching himself on taxpayer dollars in flagrant violation of the emolument clause, that the GOP is fine with.  But supporters of a man who has properties with his name emblazoned upon them in gold are freaking out because Nancy Pelosi has gold pens with her name on it as a souvenir from the signing ceremony.

Never mind that signing documents in DC is such a customary stunt that it was even done on an episode of “The West Wing.”  Never mind that it was done during the Clinton impeachment by the GOP, except because they’re idiots the pens had a typo on them and read “Untied States Senator.”  Hëll, never mind that LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act with multiple pens.  

The fact is that no one has ever complained about it in decades, until now.

Because the GOP is just that desperate.

Because the right wing is just that far out of its collective mind.

It’s really kind of a shame.  The Democrat and Republican parties used to be capable of working together.  They may have had different opinions of how government should be run, but they both believed in the truth and they both were fundamentally patriotic.  They believed that this country should stand for something.  That we should defend our allies because that was what this country was supposed to do, both for their safety and for our own.

But in the cult of Trump, that’s all gone away.  Now it’s every man for himself.  Trump has boasted that he wants to charge other countries for the protection of our armed forces, effectively transforming our soldiers into mercenaries. He has relentlessly lined his own pocket while dismissing the emolument clause, part of the Constitution that he swore an oath to protect, as “phony.”

And this week we watched as Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham, who have already publicly stated that they are incapable of being impartial jurors, swore an oath to be exactly that.  And they are on record as stating that they are working in conjunction with the White House lawyers and are loath to allow for witnesses to be called…unless Joe and Hunter Biden are on the witness list.

Basically they want to give Trump exactly what he’s been craving:  hours of the Bidens being interrogated.  Why? Because many Americans are fundamentally stupid.  A sizable portion of them don’t read beyond headlines; hëll, many of them share articles from satirical news sites as if they’re genuine.  Trump knows that the Bidens’ answers will be of no relevance.  All people will need to remember is that the Bidens were relentlessly questioned about corruption, linking it in their minds and proving that Trump was right to be worried about it.  Just as years later Hillary Clinton haters obsess about how she was grilled for hours about Congress and simply breeze over the part about how all that questioning came up with nothing.  Say “Benghazi” and “Hillary” and watch them go off on a rant.

Except we once again have evidence that Trump’s interest had nothing to do with actual investigation.  Rudy Giuliani’s aid, Lev Parnas, has been hitting the talk show circuit, endeavoring to lay groundwork for his own defense, and he’s come up with some gems.  He has made it clear that Trump didn’t care about actual investigation; he just wanted the Ukraine President to announce that an investigation was under way.  Because that was all he needed, since he is well aware of just how stupid Americans are.  He knew that all he had to do was say Biden’s son was under investigation and in our environment of “Guilty and never innocent,” that would be sufficient to condemn the son and taint his greatest presidential rival.  

Meanwhile the Government Accountability Office has finally weighed in, declaring that Trump broke the law when he held up the money that congress had set aside for Ukraine military aid.  Since the $214 million had been allocated by Congress, Trump did not have the power to hold it up just to accomplish his own policy aims.  “Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” stated the report, which would be genuinely relevant if Trump had ever given the slightest indication that he was remotely interested in faithful execution of the law.

The fact is that we need to get witnesses other than the Bidens testifying before Congress.  We need the Senators to actually keep the oaths they’ve sworn to uphold.  And we need them to grow a pair and make the right decision in the hope of saving not only their political party but the country as a whole.  

PAD

FREAK OUT FRIDAY – JANUARY 10, 2019

The country has spent the last week in a most unexpected and unusual position.  

We have been praying that the Iranian government is smarter than ours.

We’ve been praying that they realize the actions of our president do not reflect the will of the majority of the citizens of the United States.  That as much as they shout “Death to Americans,” they come to the realization that most of us not only do not wish death on Iranians, but truth to tell, we don’t really give much of a crap about them.  We don’t advocate attacking them.  They haven’t launched terrorist strikes against our country directly; haven’t blown up a skyscraper or assaulted a mall or whatever.  On an average day, most Americans don’t give Iran a second thought.  

And absolutely none of us knew who Quassem Soleiamani was.  He may well have been a national figure, and people wound up getting stampeded on his funeral, but the average American didn’t know his name, and even now can barely pronounce it, let alone spell it.  Whatever plans he may have been scheming, it had zero impact on our daily lives.  We didn’t give the slightest of dámņš about him, and I can assure you that even the most advocate of Trump supporters wasn’t interested in launching World War III in order to take this guy out.

Yet the idiot joint chiefs presented the prospect of killing him as an option to Trump in order to make the other options look more palatable.  Yeah, I’ve done the same thing.  One time Pocket needed me to come up with three concepts for a Trek novel.  I came up with two really good ones and a cliché-ridden rehash of previous episodes in order to make the other two look better.  Naturally Paramount selected the rehash.  So that stunt doesn’t always work when you’re dealing with people of limited intelligence.  And Trump certainly falls into that category.

So for the past week we actively rooted for the Iranian government to display more restraint than we would in such a situation.  Especially considering that, whatever Soleiamani may have done in the past, we have seen zero proof presented that he was an “imminent” threat, despite all of Trump’s claims that he was.  We automatically know Trump is lying because Trump always lies, and the further proof of those lies was that in subsequent briefings, his people provided no evidence to back up the claims.  When both Republican and Democrat senators are saying the briefings were BS, you know that they most definitely were.  Not to mention that seventeen years ago we saw George W. and his people launch an invasion based upon a series of lies that Saddam Hussein presented a threat with weapons of mass destruction that he was discovered not to have.  

Yet here we were now hoping that the Iranian government wouldn’t launch World War III.  Because let’s face it:  if they had retaliated by killing, I dunno, Colin Powell, Trump’s response would have been scorched Earth.  Despite the Geneva Convention, he would have targeted cultural centers, day care centers…hëll, you can’t convince me he wouldn’t have strongly considered just dropping nuclear weapons on them.  

Yet Iran’s response was remarkably restrained, lobbing some missiles at a military base and killing, as near as we can determine, no one.  Considering what they could have set into motion, we’re left breathing a sigh of relief and pray that Trump will not provoke further response.

Which of course we can forget about, because he’s busy hitting them with sanctions.  Even more ludicrous, he’s actually blaming President Obama for the missiles.  And for anyone reading this who only gets his news from Fox and Trump’s lying mouth:  No.  Obama, in a move that was coordinated with other countries, unfroze money that was already Iran’s in various banks.  And he reimbursed them for the purchase of weapons they bought in the 1970s that were never delivered.  

Yet, of course, Trump has to find yet another reason to blame Obama for things.  It’s become as reflexive as Trumpies crying “But Hillary’s emails!” every time Trump is criticized for some new outrage.  It’s expected from his blind followers, and is typical for Trump who is psychologically incapable of admitting or accepting blame for anything. He continues to blame his impeachment woes on Pelosi and the Democrats even though all of it is as a result of his own actions, phone calls, and duplicity.  He constantly presents himself as the most victimized president in our history.  No one has been treated worse! Declares the occupant of the office where others have been prosecuted for lying about sex or been shot or been killed.  He cries “witch hunt,” apparently oblivious to the fact that witch hunts went after innocent people as opposed to the investigations that have jailed and fined several dozen people.  

Meanwhile Mitch McConnell continues to protect his ášš while the GOP completely abrogates their oath to support the Constitution and instead fall in line behind a bullying narcissist.  Oh, but don’t dare criticize the fact that his assassination of the Iranian General was ill-advised and poorly thought out, because then you’re on the side of terrorists.

You know what?  Assassinating a representative of a foreign government with which war has not been declared and then stating you’re going to blow up cultural centers?  Those are the acts of terrorists.  So if you’re on Trump’s side, you support terrorism.  Simple as that.

PAD