Tag: Trump

Posted on

Trumpanazi – American descent into Nazism continues

April 13th 2019

The Premier League of Britain has a problem with some of its fans. Granted, footies have never been a particularly sedate lot, sometimes preferring to discuss the friendly rivalry between clubs with clubs, or chains, or shivs.

There have always been racist and bigoted assholes in their ranks, who delight in throwing bananas at black players, or shouting some of the particularly lurid racial abuse that is the hallmark of British hooligans.

But in recent times, the nature and frequency of these attacks has sharply increased. WestHam United is in the process of banning fans who videoed themselves singing racist ditties about the Jewish players on that night’s match rival, Tottenham. Two days earlier, Chelsea supporters sang anti Moslem chants about a player in Slavia Prague, and attacked one of their own fans who objected to the vile chants. And on the same night, Arsenal fans screamed anti-Islamic abuse at players on the other club, in a match in the Emirates. Those fans were lucky; most Islamic countries have notoriously little patience for slurs against Allah or his followers. Public whipping is the local equivalent of community service.

Of course, it isn’t just soccer. The number of such incidents has been on the rise throughout Europe and in North America. In Québec, a player, Jonathan Diaby, a 24-year-old defenseman for Marquis de Jonquière of the Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey, and his family who were watching him play were subjected to such intense racial abuse from the filth in the stands that he was pulled from the game and he and his family escorted from the stadium for their own safety.

And unfortunately, it’s not just sports where this is happening.

Nazism—and let’s stop pretending it’s anything other than Nazism—has been on the rise, and emboldened by political power in many parts of Europe and the United States, Nazis come out from under their rocks in force. This is how they behave when they think they can get away with it.

It’s a phenomenon that puts us all at risk. Yes, even if you are a member of the so-called ‘master race’, male, and Christian. It’s not a political philosophy, not that such are especially coherent or good at attending to the interests of their own followers. It’s a mental illness, and an ethical vacuum using hate as a substitute for faith and strength. It eventually destroys everything in its path.

Hitler famously executed 12 million people, including six million Jews, between 1936 and 1945. No matter what the Nazis say, that happened. And among the six million he killed who were not Jewish, many were white, ‘pureblood’ Germans, who happened to be communist, socialist, atheist, liberal, intellectual, or just not approving of Nazism’s murderous tactics. And of course, the actual fighting killed even more of the very people who supported Hitler, beginning with the Brownshirts. Nazis killed many people, and resulted in many more being dead.

So if you’re sitting there watching Faux News, smug in the certain knowledge that Trump and his ilk will only target groups you hate, read some history. He’ll get you killed, too, one way or another. If you don’t flunk some unseen test for ideological purity, you’ll die in the fighting, or in the starvation after Trump and his kind have destroyed the country and the economy. You are as much at risk as any Hispanic immigrant, or Moslem, or African American. Your death may just be later, rather than sooner.

Hitler was able to con the German people—his followers—into believing he was acting on their behalf. The war nearly destroyed them, but even without the war, he would have gotten around to putting them in work camps and then death camps after he used up all the groups he hated and needed to feed bodies to the endless maw of his nationalistic ego. The millions who died because of him are nothing compared to the hundreds of millions he envisioned killing.

Trump—and there really is little difference between Trump and Hitler at this point—doesn’t even pretend to be addressing the needs of his followers. His “tax reform” was a vicious cheat that targeted the lower middle class, the source of much of his following. He proposes to make massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and to dismantle what remains of Obamacare. Probably about three quarters of the people who voted for him will be hurt by those proposals. Many will be killed.

But Trump doesn’t care. They served their purpose. They voted for him once. Like Hitler, that one election is all he needs. Once he consolidated power, Hitler’s only use for ‘the common man’ was that of cannon fodder.

Trump is trying to stage a coup against the United States now. He purged the department of Homeland Security last week, leaving the reptilian spawn of Goebbels, Stephen Miller in effective control of an organization capable of jailing millions. The bitch who threw children in cages wasn’t vicious enough for Trump, you see. He is defying Congress on its request for his taxes—a demand Congress unequivocally has a right to issue. He is using his lapdog Barr to try to bury the Mueller report, and its doubtlessly damning contents.

He tried to threaten ‘sanctuary’ cities with sending them what he considers to be animals and subhumans—immigrants. To the credit of the American people, most of those cities said they would welcome Trump’s castoffs. And his goosestepping followers won’t even stop to consider the mad logic behind protecting America from immigrants by sending immigrants to major American cities. Bigotry and hatred don’t run on logic.

He’s attacking a member of Congress for her Islamic faith. He tweeted twice a falsehood that she was dismissive of the attacks on 9/11. Never mind that Trump rejoiced in the attacks, claiming that it left him with the tallest building in New York City. (It’s a truism that when Trump attacks someone, he almost always ends up describing his own behavior). Equating someone with 9/11 for no other reason than that they are Moslem is exactly the same as claiming that Jews like to drink the blood of Christian babies, or that African Americans live only to rape white girls.

They are blood libels, these threats and smears. It’s the sort of thing you expect to hear from Nazi filth.

And it’s what we now hear from the President of the United States.

Posted on

Stumping for Beni – Trump disgraces himself, again

April 6th, 2019

A lot of American Jews will doubtlessly be surprised to learn that Donald Trump considers Benjamin Netanyahu to be their “Prime Minister.” He was talking to the American Republican Jewish Coalition Leadership, but in fairness, Trump may not have been entirely aware that these were supposed to be American Jews and not Israeli Jews, as he went on to say, “If implemented, the Democrats’ radical agenda would destroy our economy, cripple our country, and very well could leave Israel out there all by yourselves. Can’t do that.”

Yeah. “Yourselves.” It isn’t the first time Trump has used the trope that Jews all have divided loyalties and it won’t be the last. Even as he, and the Republican party at large, condemn Ilhan Omar, the Islamic Congresswoman from Minnesota for hinting that Jews have divided loyalties for saying that AIPAC has undue influence on Congress.

He was promoting a GOP strategy called “Jexit.” It’s a clever-ish play on words, based on “Brexit” and the reasoning is that because Trump says Democrats hate Jews, there is a mass migration from the Democratic Party to the GOP. Must be true: in 2016 the Democrats got 72% of the Jewish vote, and in 2018 they got 78%. See? Oh, wait.

Then there’s that term: Jexit. Republicans may be the only carbon based lifeforms on Earth that think Brexit was a sound strategy and something desirable for their allies to emulate. Right now the UK is staggering, red-eyed, pasty, doughy and slurring her words, and town drunks are stopping her in the street and saying, “Are you OK? You really should see a doctor, you know?” And Brexit hasn’t even happened yet. The UK could go from being “the poor man of Europe” to “the Somalia of Europe.”

I think it’s a safe bet that a very large majority of American Jews do not consider Netanyahu to be their prime minister, and aren’t eager to pursue a strategy named for the biggest national own goal in history. Yes, even worse than America electing Trump.

Even Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson, perhaps the only two Jews in Las Vegas that Trump actually gives a wet shit about, have to be looking at today’s performance and wondering how far this can ride this spivened old nag of a President before he finally collapses from dementia or gets kicked out of office.

Trump apparently was advised that his father was not born in Germany, but in New York City, and people were wondering about his mental faculties as a result of his recent claims. So he put the rumors to rest by noting his father was born in Brooklyn. The only problem was that Fred wasn’t born in Brooklyn. He was born in the Bronx, just as Donald was.

“Are you OK? You really should see a doctor, you know?”

By now convinced that the speech was going swimmingly and he had his audience in the palm of his hand, he decided to do a little bit of hate mongering, and told the crowd, “A special thanks to Representative Omar of Minnesota.” The audience of Republicans obligingly booed. Trump continued,

“Oh, I forgot. She doesn’t like Israel, I forgot, I’m sorry. No, she doesn’t like Israel, does she? Please, I apologize.”

At least now we know under what circumstances Trump will say, “I apologize.” It’s when he is doing a heavy handed and lame effort at sarcasm, not a good look on a man who possesses no actual sense of humor.

His timing was a bit off, though. A New York clown, one Patrick W. Carlineo, was arrested today for calling Omar’s DC office and saying, “Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood? Why are you working for her, she’s a fucking terrorist. I’ll put a bullet in her fucking skull.” Carlineo then proceeded to leave his contact info, because, you know, it’s OK to threaten to assassinate members of Congress if they happen to be non-Christian.

I’m guessing this brain donor is a) aTrump fan, and b) not Jewish. Any takers?

But it reminds people that the hateful crap Trump spews is putting lives at risk. Hell, the stupid bastard can’t even ingratiate himself with groups he wants as allies without indulging in harmful stereotypes. Hint, Donald: American Jews are not secret agents of Israel. They don’t drink the blood of Christian babies, either. You might want to write that on the back of your hand, along with the word “Bronx.”

I don’t think he advanced the cause of Jexit. If only Britain had called the Brexit referendum, ‘Gallipoli II.’ Same positive connotations, you know.

The executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA), Halie Soifer said: “We strongly denounce President Trump’s continued assault on decency and truth, as was evident in his speech earlier today before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas.”

I suspect he was speaking for what now has to be more than 78% of Jewish voters in America.

As for Trump, a lot of people wondered why he would schedule a speech to a Jewish audience on a Saturday morning. It was, after all, Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. It occurred right after sundown in Israel, when television stations could broadcast his speech live. Israel has a general election in three days.

It’s possible that there were some Jews in the audience who DO have divided loyalties. They would be a tiny minority of the American Jewish population, but they do exist. The GOP tends to attract people like that.

But it’s certain that one person in that room does have divided loyalties, and with many different counties. Including, despite his well-known distaste for Jews, Israel.

That would be Donald Trump, once again accusing others of things he does.

Maybe he thinks Netanyahu was born in Brooklyn. Or Germany. You know, one of those New York resorts.

Posted on

Barr None – A-G’s efforts to subvert Mueller cause confusion

Barr None

A-G’s efforts to subvert Mueller cause confusion

March 25th, 2019

OK, I’m going to beobvious the labor here and tell you that I think William Barr’s third-grade book report version of the Mueller Report is somewhat short of credible.

Barr, you’ll recall, was the architect of the Iran-Contra pardons issued in the final day of the George HW Bush administration that basically destroyed a six year investigation of some of the worst felonies committed since the previous time a Republican was president. Back then, William Safire referred to Barr witheringly as “the Coverup-General” and here we are, some 23 years later, and we still have a Coverup-General, and it’s the same despicable toady.

Safire was a speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew (‘nattering nabobs of negativism’) and he found Barr contemptible in his willingness to subvert the legal process in service to party.

Safire’s dead, but the evil spawn of the far-right takeover of the GOP live on.

Barr’s letter is nothing more than a last-ditch effort to confuse the Mueller Report with Trump administration talking points. We still don’t know what’s in the Mueller report. We know that Mueller did not indict Trump for treason or even conspiracy against the United States, but that was never part of his remit. He could recommend such a course to the Justice Department or the House of Representatives, and he still might. And even Barr couldn’t manage to pretend that serious evidence of obstruction of justice didn’t exist; the best he could manage was that the Report “does not exonerate him [Trump].”

So we watch to see if Congress can wrest the report from Barr’s greasy paws and bring most, if not all of it into the light of day. We’ve gotten the talking points from Trump’s dancing monkey; now let’s see the actual report.

Even if Barr and Trump do manage to bury the report, there are three grand juries and at least a half dozen state investigations underway to determine the extent of Trump criminality in everything from using inaugural donations as a laundry for foreign influence peddling to the wild shenanigans surrounding the Trump Tower in Moscow to the demand that Moscow ferret out Hillary’s emails. Even without whatever Mueller has, Trump faces decades in prison for the potential charges he will face.

But Congress will subpoena the report, and possibly Mueller himself. Barr can’t prevent that, and Trump might face a revolution if he tried.

And remember, we still don’t know what is in that report. All Barr did was show up with an empty plastic bag draped over a hanger and grandly announce our tuxedo was back from the cleaners.

The media, in general, got completely played. I even heard a lot of them transposing Barr’s book report with the Mueller tome, and saying Mueller exonerated Trump. Most TV journalism is a vast wasteland, but even for them, that was a limp performance.

The right wing online circus weighed in, of course. One meme read, “Why are so many liberals in tears over learning that their president is not a traitor?”

I still think he’s a traitor, or at least conspiring against the United States for personal gain. (In just about any other country, conspiracy against that country would be considered treason, but the US has a very specific definition of the term ‘treason’ that sorta takes Trump off the hook.) If anyone’s crying, it’s because they just realized that Trump and the Republicans may have so badly broken the United States that it may no longer have any legal address to rid itself of an enemy in high office. That would be a death knell for any country. That would leave any thinking person in tears.

Well, Barr gave the empty-headed goosesteppers of the far right something to cheer about, and managed to confuse the equally empty-headed fluffers who purportedly keep us informed, but I doubt it’s going to last for very long.

Just the things Trump has openly admitted to should have gotten him impeached two years ago. Maybe the United States is that badly broken, in which case expect bloody and horrible times ahead.

Or maybe it’s like 1940, where the United States was suffering massive attacks on life and property from Germany on the high seas (the equivalent of a 9/11 every two weeks) and needed 18 months or so to gather the resolve to crush their vicious tormentors.

It may be that Trump himself, vicious and heedless in what he seems to believe is a victory, will trigger that himself. He has already said he would “call for organizations to fire members of the media and former government officials who he believes made false accusations about him”.

Ever heard an American President say anything like that? Nope. Not even Nixon.

Still, he needs to maintain the pretense that Barr’s Cliff’s Notes version is a substitute for the actual report, and not the real thing. And he has to do something about all those other investigations going on.

At which point, people will have to decide if they want to simply surrender to this vicious five-and-dime despot and his brown-shirt devotees, or put up a fight.

Posted on

An Evil in Christchurch – And Trump can’t even comfort the victims

March 16th 2019

Forty nine dead, eleven in critical condition, another ten or so with lesser injuries, the type that will ache on rainy days decades from now. And an entire nation emotionally scarred, also for decades.

New Zealand has always been a somewhat isolated nation, with Tonga and the Cook Islands about the only land within 1,500 miles. Australia is the only significant nation that comes within 2,500 miles. Most of the world’s problems, even nuclear war, seemed remote. The only exceptions were the World Wars, where New Zealand took the highest human toll in relation to the population of just about anyone except Scotland. Even natural disasters, except for earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, were remote events, well over the horizons. Until ozone depletion and climate disruption, even the impact of humanity on the planet seemed distant.

New Zealand had fairly lax gun laws, but this didn’t raise any alarums because New Zealand didn’t seem to have a big gun problem, at least by American standards. Since the turn of the century, the annual gun toll hadn’t exceeded 60, and was gradually declining. The low numbers did hide a disturbing fact: New Zealand only has about 3.6 million people, roughly 1% of the United States population. Multiply the gun casualty totals by a hundred, and you find that it’s actually a quite high rate, nearly a half that of the US.

Yesterday’s attacks on those Christchurch mosques and that hospital may exceed the gun death total for New Zealand in some recent years. While it’s not exactly an identical set of circumstances, the sheer bloodletting was, for NZ, worse than 9/11 was for the States.

Apparently a lot of kids and old folks died. Just because they went to service on their holy day.

The Right Honourable Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister, noted that the killer had obtained all five guns legally, and said, “I can tell you one thing right now: our gun laws will change. There have been attempts to change our laws in 2005, 2012 and after an inquiry in 2017. Now is the time for change.”

Given the magnitude of the terrorist attack, and the fact that New Zealand doesn’t have a treacherous gun lobby group standing on its collective throat, I believe her. The NZ Attorney General, David Parker, has been warning of the hazards extremist white nationalism presents (“There is a dimming of enlightenment in many parts of the world”), and vows to ban semi-automatic weapons within weeks. I hope he succeeds.

The accused is an emigré from Australia, a land beset by vicious racists and bigotry in its dominant right-wing political party. (Sound familiar?) One utter piece of shit, a member of their Senate, one Fraser Anning tweeted: “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence? As always, leftwing politicians and the media will rush to claim that the causes of today’s shootings lie with gun laws or those who hold nationalist views, but this is all cliched nonsense. The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.”

OK, Anning is bigoted filth, and obviously he doesn’t represent many Australians or the whole country would be one vast death camp by now.

Murdoch’s media, classy as always, delighted in showing the footage the accused murderer shot while killing innocent men, women and children. Murdoch would have loved the concentration camps, especially the firing squads. New Zealand shut his channel down for the interim until his blood lust settled a bit.

With Parker’s “dimming of enlightenment” there are Nazi politicians in many parts of the world now, including the United States.

Ardern contacted Trump and asked him to convey condemnation of the bigotry and terrorism of the attack. Trump could manage to do neither, instead tweeting, “My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!”

Warmest sympathies from a man who has never shown any signs of sympathy in his entire wastrel life. Wow. Must be thoughts and prayers time.

Even John Bolton worked up the intellectual honesty to call yesterday’s attacks an act of terrorism, and he is no friend to Moslems.

Trump couldn’t manage that. He did refer to immigration as an invasion, just as the Australian immigrant did in his 70+ page screed that served as his case for hate-filled losers to fire weapons-grade weaponry at small children and grandparents.

Well, Hitler probably wasn’t too sympathetic to the Jewish victims on Krystallnacht, instead bleating about how the poor innocent brown shirts were driven to acts of violence by the depredations of the Jews.

There may still be a difference between Hitler and Trump, but that difference exists only because Hitler was faster to consolidate power. When Trump can’t even acknowledge that this was a specific terrorist attack against a select group of people because it’s the same people he’s been vilifying for years (along with African Americans and Hispanics and Jews) then emotionally he isn’t far from Hitler. In the end, Hitler may simply have been more intelligent than Trump.

So New Zealand will try to make amends and make things right. Here in America, Trump will encourage similar attacks.

Don’t believe me? Just watch.

Posted on

Nothing To Be Done For It – Nancy wants to surrender and beat the traffic

March 11th 2019

Nancy Pelosi once again demonstrated today the utter worthlessness of centrist Democrats when she said, “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. He’s just not worth it.”

Pelosi, do you not think TRUMP is dividing the country? Saying that impeaching the motherfucker would divide the country is like saying we shouldn’t let a skunk wander into one of those gawdawful pig factories because it would make the place smell bad. Trump is ripping the country to shreds, and as Republicans make utter disgraces of themselves going along with it, Democratic centrists are nearly as bad, looking woeful and sighing, “There’s nothing to be done for it.”

Pelosi doesn’t want to jump on the “Impeach the motherfucker” bandwagon, and I get that. She has to appear fair and willing to hear Trump’s side of the story.

“There’s nothing to be done for it.” The line is from Samuel Beckett’s paean to existential despair, “Waiting for Godot.” (Godot is pronounced ‘Goddo’ for those of you who didn’t get the joke.) In the play, Vladimir (no relation to Trump’s Vladimir) is trying, without luck, to pull off one of his boots. His companion, Estragon, is watching him struggle, and ruminating on the hopelessness of hope and the hope of hopelessness, or words to that effect, and concludes, “There’s nothing to be done for it.” And at that moment, the boot pops right off.

Beckett was being a smartass when he had Estragon say that.

The Dems say it with no sense of irony.

“We mustn’t put up a fight. We mustn’t shout, or make demands, or punish wrongdoers. We might upset the sort of idiot who thinks fighting for what is right is exactly equal to fighting for what is wrong, like Trump and his minions are doing.”

It’s a defeated, placatory attitude that delights Trump and his fascists, and disgusts people who vote Democratic on the basis that someone has to oppose Trump.

Pelosi should have said something like, “I want to see what Mueller’s office and the various House and Senate committees come up with. They have to make a good case for impeachment. If they cannot, then I won’t consider it a viable option, because I’m not Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde, and won’t impeach a man just because he’s a pig.

“On the other hand, if there is a solid case, we’ll come after him with everything we’ve got, and paint every newspaper and media outlet with our evidence, and god help any Republican who dares to stand in our way.”

One big problem that undermines that is the last time she was offered that option, she ran for her life, taking impeachment (of Bush, Cheney and other war criminals) right off the table. So even if she had given a better answer, I would be suspicious. Like most centrist Dems, she doesn’t seem to know how to fight, doesn’t want to fight, and is scared to death that Fox News would convince the country she’s being mean to that nice Mister Trump.

When she realized she might face an intraparty challenge for the speakership last December, she said, “We have to wait and see what happens with the Mueller report. We shouldn’t be impeaching for a political reason, and we shouldn’t avoid impeachment for a political reason. So we’ll just have to see how it comes,” Now it sounds like she’s backpedelling on that.

“He’s just not worth it.” Pelosi, do you understand that’s been a favorite phrase of people backing down from a fight for centuries? It’s right up there with “Too proud to fight” as an excuse for not getting your fur up and showing some teeth. Given your background on punishing Republicans for criminal actions, you’ve just sent a huge lightning bolt of doubt and uncertainty through the Democratic Party, many of whom were cultivating a hope you would bring this fight to Trump and his criminal cabal.

Now, somewhere in your political calculations, you probably realize that by showing weakness now, you are probably encouraging Democrats who are willing to ‘impeach the motherfucker’ to walk away from the party, along with millions of voters, many of whom have tepidly supported your decades-long line of conciliatory centrist who promise to work well with the fascists. At some point, you might have even wondered how much damage it might do in the next election.

If we can’t raise the gumption to challenge Trump now, there’s a pretty good chance there won’t be a ‘next election.’ You won’t have to worry about damage to the party through bad optics from your utterly imaginary centrist voters because the whole fucking country will be trashed, and ‘opposition parties’ will have gone the way of the Weimar Republic.

So I’ll just close with a reworking of a speech some English bloke, facing someone even more duplicitous and vicious than Trump, said back some 75 years ago: “…we shall surrender on the seas and oceans, we shall surrender with growing confidence we can outrun our adversaries, we shall defend our optics, whatever the cost may be. We shall surrender on the beaches, we shall surrender on the landing grounds, we shall surrender in the fields and in the streets, we shall surrender in the hills; we shall never fight,”

You deserve Vladimir’s boot, Pelosi. The Vladimir that owns your President.

Posted on

Kim & Cohen – Trump didn’t have a chance

March 1st 2019

It’s pretty easy to see how desperate and panicked the Trumpkins in the GOP are by the shrill screams of “liar!” they keep hurling at Michael Cohen. Two of the more prominent whores in Congress, Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, asked the Justice Department to investigate Cohen for perjury, saying he lied during his appearance about his efforts to land a White House job and his work for foreign companies, among other topics. Most Republicans settled for screaming “He lied before! He lied before!” while carefully forgetting to mention that he lied at the behest of Party Leader Donald Trump.

The Republicans all attacked Cohen for attacking Trump. None of them could think of a way of defending Trump against any of the allegations.

Cohen testified today behind closed doors, and the reports leaking out are that his testimony was even more detailed and damning than the testimony he gave in public.

Some of the Trump whelps, Don Junior and Ivanka, may be called it to testify under oath as early as next week. I’m sure fearless leader does not regard that as a happy thought. Maybe he can get Congressmen Gaetz to arrange for them both to have skiing accidents before they appear before the Committee. And yes, I can say something like that: it isn’t a threat, it’s just “witness testing.” (Note to FBI: There’s also the fact that I want the whelps to appear before Congress, preferably in open session.)

Joe Scarborough, not exactly a gleaming bastion of liberalism, had this to say about the pathetic performance of House Republicans: “Republican members of the House Oversight Committee exposed themselves in plain sight…in plain sight…as a political party whose goal, whose purpose and whose central organizing principle…is to cover up for the illegal and immoral misdeeds of Donald J. Trump.” Scarborough considered this a giant step toward political oblivion by the GOP. I hope he’s right. The GOP ceased to be a legitimate political party after the Ford pardon.

In just three sessions, the Democrats uncovered more illegalities and malfeasance on the part of the administration than were found by all the thousands of hours of Congressional time wasted on White Water, Benghazi, the emails, Paula Jones and Monica, combined.

The irony of Republicans attacking Cohen for lying on behalf of Trump wasn’t lost on Cohen, who told them, “Republican members of the House Oversight Committee exposed themselves in plain sight…in plain sight…as a political party whose goal, whose purpose and whose central organizing principle…is to cover up for the illegal and immoral misdeeds of Donald J. Trump.”

This won’t stop the Republicans from their smear efforts, though. They are a party that lives in a world of lies, self-delusion, and the belief they can say anything and get away with it. They can’t even see the pieces of the temple falling around their own heads.

Perhaps the most horrifying thing Cohen said was after the second, public day of testimony: “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.” He knows Trump well. He probably knows whereof he speaks.

Trump must never be permitted to be in a position of trying to consolidate power in 2020. He must be gone from office before then.

It’s a deep shame that America must have to rely on the courage and patriotism of Republicans to ensure that. It’s like hoping the sewer rats will save your child from drowning.

Trump went to Vietnam to meet with Kim Jong Un, putatively to lend some credence to the vague and genial almost-agreement made in the first meeting but realistically to try to detract from the damage the Cohen hearings were sure to inflict.

Kim let Trump know that he would be willing to consider partial denuclearization in return for the US dropping all trade and economic sanctions against his country. Even Trump, hungry for any kind of event he could twist into a triumph of some sort, knew that was a non-starter and stalked away from the meeting.

It was, perhaps, the most total and abject humiliation of an American president in any international meeting. It was obvious to everyone that Kim knew exactly what he was doing, and that his intended aim was to humiliate Trump. There was no “misreading of signs” or any of that balderdash: it was deliberate.

Kim wanted to show the world that he could ride the paper tiger named Trump. He sent the seething American president away with the studied indifference of a hiring officer for a large corporation who invites someone to cross the country to apply for a position, only to tell him the job had been filled.

Korean attitudes toward “face” are quite similar to those of the Japanese, and even in South Korea, where people desperately wanted Trump to succeed with the reclusive dictator, respect for Trump all but vanished in the wake of this travesty. Even as they condemn the perfidy of Kim, South Koreans are asking why the American president didn’t come prepared for something like this—it wasn’t like Kim didn’t already have a track record—and counter measures beyond stalking away in a huff as a weak pretense that is was anything other than a shambolic retreat.

Trump went in needing a big, splashy win against a man whose record for bad-faith dealing and viciousness are about as bad as…well, Trump’s. But Trump was in the position of supplicant. Kim had nothing to lose from blowing up the talks. Trump had everything to lose.

China and the Japanese were secretly laughing and shaking their heads in disbelief. And 6,000 miles to the west, Putin was watching his morning news and smiling. America was weakened further.

Of course, it didn’t help that, in an effort by Trump to ingratiate himself with the North Korean dictator, he absolved Kim of any responsibility for the torture and subsequent death of the US student Otto Warmbier in a North Korean prison. Even Republicans were outraged by that.

And the great unraveling of the Trump regime continues.

Posted on

Trumpenstag Fizzle – Even Coulter thinks he’s an idiot now

February 15th 2019

I usually don’t watch Trump on TV any more. It’s not just because he’s a vile jerk and a jackass—after all, I watched George Bush the lesser for eight years—but because he is so fundamentally dishonest the only way you’ll actually learn anything is if he has an unguarded moment and blurts out a truth of some sort.

Yeah, stopped clock and all that. Even the blind nut finds a squirrel.

Sure enough, Trump committed a MUT—Moment of Unintentional Truth, when he blurted out, “I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.”

OK, so it’s not actually an emergency. It wasn’t an emergency for the first two years Trump was in office, and with nothing materially changing on the border in the month since, still isn’t an emergency. The only thing that made it an emergency was Congress changed hands, and Trump wanted to blame the Democrats for not getting his wall. But Trump has put it in terms that no court or Congressman can ignore: as an “emergency,” this is pure bullshit.

Ann Coulter, now the moral compass of the GOP, had her own MUT when she blurted during a radio interview, “The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.”

Another blind nut, another squirrel. Will wonders ever cease?

I’m sure Ann has her own reasons for hating Trump, and I’m equally sure those reasons reside in an utterly alien universe, but it is sort of fun watching her and Trump get in a pissing match. Two baboons, feces at five feet. Duel of the century, folks. Gitcher popcorrn here.

As mentioned, I watched Trump for as long as I could stomach it. It was hilarious in the way that Rufus T. Firefly was hilarious, or Charlie Chaplin as The Great Dictator. Except this is real. Ann’s idiot, burdened with dementia and underlying personality disorders, is the most powerful man on the planet, militarily speaking, with the ability to kill us all.

But, overlooking his ability to ruin or end your life, it was pretty funny.

He spent a fair bit of time praising Rush Limbaugh, passé radio demagogue, for his ability to speak for three hours straight without taking a phone call. Apparently being able to rant for hours at a time is considered a virtue with Trump. Certainly some leaders have been noted for it: Fidel Castro, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini all spring to mind. Limbaugh is only fair-to-middling long-winded by radio gasbag standards who are free to repeat themselves endlessly and make stuff up for the edification of their audience, whose IQs are generally measured in units of birdseed.

Trump claimed (falsely) that drugs flowed freely over the border in those areas where there is no wall. Since most drugs come in by plane or through border crossings, that’s sort of true, but Trump wants to stop drugs from flowing into the country, he says. To that end, of the $8 billion he wants to steal for his vanity project, $2.5 billion would come from the Pentagon’s drug interdiction program.

Very good, Donald. Next, you can shut down the IRS in order to pay for a committee on tax cheating.

Trump admits that his declaration would do poorly in the courts, comparing it to his fatwa against Islamic immigrants. It would lose in the ninth, and then the appeals (he got the order reversed, of course, but “We’ll end up in the Supreme Court and hopefully get a fair shake and win in the Supreme Court just like the ban.” Yup, you have two partisan hacks who owe you in the Court.

But it’s unlikely to even make it to the courts.

The House will take it up, probably today, and will probably pass a resolution negating the Declaration of Emergency in the following days next week. Already, Democratic congressionals are sidling up to their Republican counterpoints and whispering, “Say, I can’t wait for President Ocasio-Cortez to Declare a State of Emergency in order to make the Green New Deal the law of the land.”

The Republican’s face turns white and his pants turn brown at the thought of such a demonic presidential power unleashed. 2018 taught them the ability to steal elections is not absolute, and public will can thwart corporate design.

Most of them have already realized the only thing worse than having someone other than Trump as a candidate in 2020 is having Trump as a candidate in 2020. It’s an offal thought.

They will decide not to give Trump this power. I’m guessing the resolution might get 350 votes.

So it goes to the Senate, where Mitch McConnell can’t simply kill it by refusing to let it come up for a vote. The law mandates open debate and a public vote on this sort of resolution within two weeks.

Mitch had already crouched and urinated a profession of undying love for Trump and his Emergency declaration, so I’m predicting that Mitch is going to have a really shitty time of it, especially since many Republicans are either unwilling to give any president a blank check like that, and/or are thoroughly fed up with Trump and deeply apprehensive of what bizarre stunt he might come up with next.

So Trump will claim the $1.4 billion he got for border security is far better than the $1.57 billion he was offered in December, and far better than the $8 billion he wanted. That boy spins like the Tasmanian Devil on meth.

Winning is his! Medals for Everyone!

Posted on

False Alarm – Trump’s State of Emergency

February 14th 2019

By all accounts, Captain Pissmop is going to declare a state of emergency as a last-ditch effort to get funding for his foolish wall. If he doesn’t do that, I’m still covered: I can keep the main title and just write an entirely different piece. It’s all good.

It’ will probably work as well as his efforts to extort the wall out of the country by shutting down the government. The arithmetic on that one, even by GOP standards, was atrocious. Trump wanted $5.7 billion for a wall. The Dems offered to add $1.57 billion for ‘border security.” The Republicans in Congress thought that was reasonable, and voted for the bill. Trump then proceeded to shut down the government, a fiasco that cost the country $11 billion dollars, ruined hundreds of thousands of lives, and in the end, simply kicked the can down the road for three weeks.

The latest bill has $1.4 billion for border security with any mathematician will tell you is less than $1.57 billion. Bizarrely, the GOP and Trump tried to spin that as a victory for the Wallbangers, and when, for some inexplicable reason, that didn’t work, Trump tried vacillating on signing the bill. The Republicans in Congress, who just spent the past two months getting massaged with sledgehammers over the shutdown, elected to not play along. Which led to Pissmop’s final gambit: this state of emergency.

The idea is that Trump can use the declaration to strip funds away from other emergencies, such as Puerto Rico’s hurricane relief, or the fires in California.

Even by his standards, it’s an unbelievably cruel, vicious, and dishonest tactic. Any person who supports him on this is a disgrace both as a person and as an American. At this point, if you support Trump, there is something deeply wrong with you, morally, mentally and intellectually. You have to be a sociopath, deranged, and stupid, or all three.

The question remains: how many Republicans will follow him into this new sewer of a rabbit hole?

There was an interesting exchange on the Senate floor this afternoon that suggests that even the corporate whores have lost patience. Chuck Grassley, a man seemingly willing to eat tons of turds for the GOP, was interrupted by Mitch McConnell, who breathlessly announced that Trump would sign the spending bill, and that he would issue a national emergency declaration to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

McConnell, the biggest whore in the Senate, declared proudly, “I indicated to him I am going to support the national emergency declaration.”

The party spin is that Grassley was having a bad hair day and was only annoyed, yeah, pissy, at being interrupted by the Majority Leader. Because Grassley has such a rich history of snarking at party leadership, you understand.

I’m guessing that Grassley knew exactly why McConnell was interrupting him and didn’t like it one little bit. Earlier this morning, at a prayer function of the sort that afflicts representative democracy, he said, “Let’s all pray that the president will have wisdom to sign the bills so government doesn’t shut down.” Note lack of support for the politically suicidal tactic of declaring a phony emergency so Trump can steal from victims of natural disasters. Grassley may be willing to sacrifice the country for the sake of the party, but he isn’t willing to sacrifice Chuck Grassley for the sake of the party. He knows that if Pissmop’s scheme to fuck over American victims for his vanity project ever came to pass, it would be the absolute end of the Republican Party and Chuck Grassley.

Hence his barely concealed disgust for the obsequious McConnell.

In an unrelated development, Atlantic magazine printed an excerpt from Andrew McCabe’s book, “The Threat”. McCabe was fired by a vindictive Trump just a day and a half before he was to retire for speaking out against the firing of James Comey.

McCabe wrote, “The president steps over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he encounters them. Everyone in America saw it when he fired my boss. But I saw it firsthand time and time again.”

That’s pretty damning, especially since he discloses that the Department of Justice heads were seriously discussing the possibility of the Cabinet declaring Trump unable to perform his duties and removing him from office. (Trump, perhaps uneasily aware that it could happen, had a spectacular Twitter meltdown today over that one.)

In a telling vignette, McCabe wrote:

Trump launched back into his speech about what a great decision it was to fire Jim Comey, how wonderful it was that the director was gone, because so many people did not like Comey, even hated him—he actually used the word hate.

Eventually he changed the subject. He said that he wanted to come to FBI headquarters to see people and excite them and show them how much he loves the FBI. He pressed me to answer whether I thought it was a good idea. I said it was always a good idea to visit. I was trying to take some of the immediacy out of his proposal—to communicate that the door was always open, so that he wouldn’t feel he had to crash through it right away. I knew what a disaster it could turn out to be if he came to the Hoover Building in the near future. He pressed further, asking specifically, Do you think it would be a good idea for me to come down now? I said, Sure.

He looked at Don McGahn. The president said, Don, what do you think? Do you think I should go down to the FBI and speak to the people?

McGahn was sitting in one of the wooden chairs to my right. Making eye contact with Trump, he said, in a very pat and very prepared way, If the acting director of the FBI is telling you he thinks it is a good idea for you to come visit the FBI, then you should do it.

Then McGahn turned and looked at me. And Trump looked at me and asked, Is that what you’re telling me? Do you think it is a good idea?

It was a bizarre performance. I said it would be fine. I had no real choice. This was not worth the ultimate sacrifice.

In this moment, I felt the way I’d felt in 1998, in a case involving the Russian Mafia, when I sent a man I’ll call Big Felix in to meet with a Mafia boss named Dimitri Gufield. The same kind of thing was happening here, in the Oval Office. Dimitri had wanted Felix to endorse his protection scheme. This is a dangerous business, and it’s a bad neighborhood, and you know, if you want, I can protect you from that. If you want my protection. I can protect you. Do you want my protection? Trump and his men were trying to work me the way a criminal brigade would operate.

For whatever reason, the visit to the FBI never happened.

No. It’s not going to get better from here. It’s going to get worse.

Posted on

Opening Day – A Light at the End of a Cave

January 25th 2019

Just the other day, I wrote, “First, he [Mitch McConnell] may have decided he could keep 40 Republicans in line, effectively filibustering the bill. Given that would be the same forty Republicans who voted for that very same bill five weeks earlier, only to have Trump double-cross them, dumping them into a nightmare of rising public fury, it’s unlikely that even the goose stepping discipline for which the Senate GOP is renowned could keep them all in line…Second: McConnell finally convinced Trump that the wall was nothing but a loser from the GOP standpoint.”

Turns out in the end that it was something of a combination of the two. He had the two votes, and while they didn’t actually do anything, they sent a clear message: Republicans in the Senate were far more interested in a “clean” (no wall) continuing resolution to open the portions of government closed by the idiotic impasse than they were in securing funds for the wall, or whatever it is Trump is calling it this week.

After the votes, reports leaked of mounting Republican fury and desperation in the Senate, shared by McConnell himself, who snapped at one cohort, “Do you think I’m enjoying this?”

Still, the Senate, the Republican half especially, is something of a kabuki. An experienced Senate Majority Leader isn’t going to permit a vote which shows large cracks in his caucus unless he wants someone to know those cracks exist.

Even the Idiot Trump had to know that six Republican Senators voting for a clean CR meant they were never going to vote for the wall.

Another such vote might result in a 66-34 vote. There’s an element of kabuki in Senate votes, and while 66 Senators would have voted for the CR, the final vote needed to make the vote veto-proof, which almost certainly would have to be cast by a Republican, would be hard to get.

However, public rage was mounting by the day. Republicans, blindly in love with their delusion that voters want them to eliminate government so they can have all that common wealth all to themselves, were quickly realizing that the voters had a different opinion on the matter. And while most of the public blame was correctly aimed at Trump, the Republican Senate was seen, at best, as his lackeys, and at worst as his co-criminals.

I think Americans have finally lost patience with the GOP tactic to using extortions such as government shut downs to get things they want but which lack the political and public support. That’s my hope. Time will tell.

But for now, all the poor bastards who missed meals and saw their credit scores plummet because of der Trumpenfuhrer’s little games are going to get their back pay, and the even poorer bastards who did contract work for the government are still fucked. Lots of damage done, and for utterly insane reasons, but at least it stopped getting worse.

Another reason for the Trump Cave came from Robert Mueller III. He grabbed his scoop and a plastic bag and got Roger Stone last night. Stone, one of the sleaziest and most vicious political operatives in the country, is believed to have had a central role in the three way tryst between Trump, Wikileaks, and Russia. And probably a whole lot more.

Trump’s tweet reaction was…less than lucid. It read, “Greatest Witch Hunt in the History of our Country! NO COLLUSION! Border Coyotes, Drug Dealers and Human Traffickers are treated better. Who alerted CNN to be there?” Sounds like a Speak N’ Spell with rabies, doesn’t it?

I’m sure the mental image the tweet created, of an American President, naked, smeared in his own feces, screaming and ineffectually urinating in the direction of the CNN building, is a bit less than reassuring. But have no fear: Ann Coulter stepped in to reassure him and calm him down.

She tweeted, “Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.”

That’s right: She kicked a recently-dead guy to take a shot at a volatile moron over losing a no-win situation that she helped precipitate in the first place. History will remember you kinda, Annie.

She went on to say, “Obviously the gov’t shutdown hasn’t gone far enough if the corrupt & incompetent FBI still has funds for a Keystone Cops stunt like the pre-dawn raid on Roger Stone….Sure feel safer today, with the feds taking Roger Stone off the streets. No need for a border wall now. Nothing to fear from MS-13.”

Gotta say, Annie, I feel a lot safer with Roger Stone in jail. Truth be told, I think the average MS-13 member has higher moral and ethical standards than Stone—or you, for that matter.

But the upshoot of the Mueller action this morning shows that for Trump, the walls are closing in like a Star Wars trash compactor. (Ann as Princess Leia: shudder!)

The continuing resolution is good through Feb 12th, whereupon we find out if the Republicans and Trump want to play some more of their extortion games, or if they finally realized that particular tactic has passed it sell-by date, and the public is well and truly fed up with it.

Meanwhile, Trump will be able to give his SOTU speech, if perhaps a week or two late. I hope the Democrats don’t waste any time being polite to him. He does not deserve respect, or even polite courtesy.

Boo the lies, people! If they can do it in Parliament, they can do it here!

Posted on

Down 0-63 After One Quarter – For Trump, only losing six yards on a play is doing good.

January 20th, 2019

Back in 1916, there was a football game between a powerhouse team coached by John Heisman, and a college that had actually already disbanded its football program, but was contractually obliged to play this particular game. So, lacking an actual team, they sent a pack of frat boys, lambs to the slaughter.

There wasn’t much doubt about who would win: it was the score that made history. Cumberland 0, Georgia Tech 222. It was the most lopsided game in history, and observers suspected Tech wanted revenge for a 22-0 baseball drubbing by Cumberland earlier that year. Tech took a 63-0 lead in the first quarter, and built on it for a 126-0 lead at the half. Heisman solemnly warned his squad during the break to be wary of a possible comeback, but the fact was Cumberland was deader than Queen Victoria. Grantland Rice, the sportswriter, noted that Cumberland’s moment of glory came in the second half, when they had a running play in which they only lost six yards.

The stats were cringeworthy: Tech outran Cumberland by a net 564 yards, capitalizing on 15 turnovers. Oddly enough, Cumberland had the better passing game. They went 2-18 for 14 yards, while Tech never even attempted one pass. The score actually fails to show just how lopsided the game was.

So why am I talking about a football game from over a century ago? I mean, I’m not even a football fan!

Well, I was watching Pelosi and Trump this week, and that ancient rogering came to mind.

Trump has been reeling from one self-inflicted catastrophe to the next, and on his best days, he only suffers an embarrassment, and every so often, he has a great day that is merely disappointing.

I watched the televised meeting between Trump and Pence (who knew what as coming and simply went tharn) and Pelosi and Schumer, and my first thought was “It’s Boris and Natasha versus Moose and Squirrel.” Those Russian agents never had a chance.

When Trump crowed that “I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck.” I knew he had lost this one, no matter what he did.

At the time, I figured he would back down. His silly burst of braggadocio had seemingly ensured that he couldn’t shut the government down and evade blame for it.

But I actually underestimated Trump’s craven and easily-manipulated personality. He managed to publicly fold in the face of disapproval from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. A fringe pair. A has-been and a sociopath. Even most Republicans dismiss them as a pair of dips. Outside of the GOP—which is to say among the other 72% of Americans—they are regarded as two of the more loathsome examples of what crawls around under damp American rocks.

Depending on the approval of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to stiffen public support is a bit like plotting to win the Indy 500 by entering a Yugo. Or getting a pickup squad of 19 guys—three of whom subsequently get lost en route to the game—to play Georgia Tech.

Pelosi must have looked at the political dynamics at play and resolved to not show the pity Trump seemed to demand, since Trump would never show her any pity. Pelosi, after all, is human.

On the other hand, Trump was hurting a lot of people and actually endangering the country in order to suck up to a pair of fringe loons who represent the worst America has to offer. Knowing that probably helped Pelosi to decide that she really didn’t have to play nice with the vicious fool in the Oval Office.

Everyone knows about the subsequent interplay: Pelosi told Donald he wasn’t going to give the State of the Union in front of a Joint Session of Congress until he reopened the government, citing security concerns. I’ll bet any amount of money Trump immediately turned to Miller and screeched, “She can’t DO that! Can she?” No constitutional scholar, he. She can. She did.

Trump responded by canceling her planned trip to NATO allies and Afghanistan via military plane, citing security concerns. It was a pretty feeble riposte, petty tit-for-tat, but it might have actually held water had Melania used a military plane to travel—alone—to Mir-a-Lago that afternoon. OK, granted, Trump probably wouldn’t care much if she died in a plane crash. But then two days later, he exposed and scuppered plans by Pelosi to go ahead with her planned trip via private plane.

Then he announced a big, important announcement for noon yesterday. Now, Trump has taken us all to that particular rodeo many times before, to the point where when he gave a “big announcement” a few weeks ago, the Chuck-and-Nancy rebuttal actually got higher ratings. I wasn’t going to bother watching, simply because the Trump sideshow has gotten so tiresome.

Pelosi felt the same way, I guess. She rejected his offer before he even made it. Oddly enough, I didn’t hear any Republicans accusing her of jumping the gun.

Trump did offer to provide a temporary respite to Dreamers—there’s already court orders telling him he must do so by law—and that was it. The offer didn’t fool any sane Americans, and pissed off the haters on the fascist/Nazi right. So aside from getting a very public slap-down, all he did was harden resolve against him, while chipping away at his loathsome base.

Now there’s open talk among Democrats of impeachment, and outside Washington, talk of a national general strike.

Last night I mentioned on one blog that once Nancy Pelosi gets her fur up, she can be quite formidable.

The same, of course, could be said of the American people.

Donald came into this quarter trailing 63-0. Things don’t look to improve. It’s unlikely that even Heisman is going to be warning anyone of a Trump comeback on this one.

error

Enjoy Zepps Commentaries? Please spread the word :)