Bryan Zepp Jamieson
May 12th, 2018
I had been treating the whole Stormy Daniels thing as an amusing sideshow. Anyone who ever watched “The Sopranos” knew that Trump was just a real-life version of Tony Soprano, and knew that he spent a lot of this spare time banging porn stars, hookers, and any woman unlucky enough to catch his attention. I didn’t have any reason to want to contemplate Trump’s sex life (ewwww…) but after nearly thirty years of listening to Republican whining and hypocritical, pious moaning over Bill Clinton, it was fun watching these same proctors of public morality proclaim that Trumps self-whoring and harassing was Different, somehow.
Even better was seeing the despicable Evangelical movement implode over Trump. Franklin, son of Dead Billy, asserted that it was nobody’s business who Trump was banging, and finished off the little credibility that sanctimonious pack of Mrs Grundies possessed.
With Trump enjoying an approval rating from these Falangists who wish to assert Dominion over us once and for all of 80%, it marked the absolute end of the reputation of evangelical Christianity as any sort of ethical or moral force, to the delight of everyone sick of their pious mewlings and scared of their designs to take over the country.
Against the background of the Mueller investigation and the sheer vicious criminality of the Trump regime, it seemed like small beans. I thought the prime effect would be the self-destruction of the puritans.
Then Avenatti started talking about the ‘fees’ that were pouring into Michael Cohen’s shell company for explications from Cohen on how the mind of America’s first RICO-American president actually worked. That had to be pretty tawdry, but was not, in itself, particularly illegal. While the intent (‘pay to play) was illegal, the fiction behind the fees was not. So it didn’t take any of the entities named, such as AT&T long to admit that they had, in fact, paid such fees to Cohen. In AT&Ts case, they stated they paid roughly double what Michael Avenatti knew about.
The media was aghast; it was a major story they had entirely missed. They were, of course, presuming that because they hadn’t noticed it, it probably didn’t exist, and of course the GOP ratfuckers went right to work, triumphantly announcing that the Avenatti claims where riddled with errors, including payments made to another Michael Cohen altogether.
It was that which sealed Cohen’s fate; examination showed that while there were some errors on his list, Avenatti had an accuracy rate of some 97%. What was worse was that more and more payees were coming forward (remember, they faced no legal jeopardy for this) and the pay-for-play system Cohen had erected was even bigger than Avenatti had discovered.
The next question was, “Why hasn’t Mueller acted on this?” Leaving aside the issue of whether any actual laws were broken (in Citizens United States, bribery is basically legal) it came to light that several of the biggest donors had already been quietly interviewed by Mueller’s people several months ago. Mueller runs an incredibly tight ship, and nobody in the media was bright enough to realize that rather than asking Mueller’s people what they asked various donors, they should ask the donors themselves, since they were under no obligation not to discuss the questions and answers.
In most countries, Trump and Cohen would be facing massive criminal charges and decades in prison.
In the roiling sewer of capitalist America, it’s not clear that they broke any laws. Financially, America is a bit like Deadwood, where the only consequence to murder is to make sure the victim didn’t have any buddies who might come looking for you for killing him.
Meanwhile, Trump unilaterally reneged on the Iran agreement, and Israel promptly began strafing some of the remaining Arab population on the Golan Heights under the guise of “attacking Iran outposts”. Syria fired their own rockets, promoting howls that they had attacked Israeli territory.
They hit the Golan Heights, which is Syrian. For decades, Israeli land thieves, squatters calling themselves “settlers” had been infiltrating the occupied area (never referred to as such by Israel because occupation is illegal under UN treaty, although occupation is exactly what it is) and stealing land and displacing the residents. That Israel was attacked is a lie.
Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia wants to see Iran embroiled in a major war, but neither see any need to spend money and manpower themselves: they have a perfectly good puppet state, America, willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and uncountable lives to fight the war for them.
And Trump desperately needs a major war to save his presidency. The ginned-up war in Iraq got the undeserving Bush reelected, and even though thousands of Americans died and it has cost nearly a trillion dollars, Americans didn’t mind because the economy stayed stable and they weren’t rationed.
Iran is far more powerful than Saddam’s Iraq. And far far more powerful than Afghanistan, a third-world country that has had America locked in a hopeless, expensive struggle for 17 years now.
There’s also the fact that outside of the evangelical community and Wall Street, nobody likes or trusts Trump, and won’t go all glassy-eyed and patriotic when he starts waving the flag and getting Americans killed.
But it’s the only thing he has left to save his presidency.
Expect the most disastrous war in America’s history to ensue.
