Tag: Trump

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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.

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Barr None – He hit all the right notes, but…

January 15th, 2019

I watched the William Barr hearing this morning, and came away with mixed feelings. He hit all the right notes, vowing not to interfere with the Mueller investigation (but not swearing to recuse himself) and agreeing that the investigation was valid and important and needed to continue.

He agreed that a primary role of the DoJ was to prevent foreign interference in US elections, but undercut it by saying that Russia “appeared to interfere” in the 2016 election. That’s a bit like saying Boston appeared to have won the 2018 World Series. The equivocation is pointless, and leaves one with the unsettling feeling that Barr doesn’t really understand the nature of the investigations against Trump. At best, that’s what he doesn’t understand.

He also had a weird equivocation about the Emoluments Clause, appearing uncertain as to whether it could pertain to Trump. It reads, “And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” An emolument is “profit, salary, or fees from office or employment; compensation for services: Tips are an emolument in addition to wages.” OK, Trump is holding an office of trust, and is getting gifts and kickbacks from a variety of foreign states. Seems pretty straightforward. And it would be insane to pretend that presidents are above the law on conflicts of interest, bribery, self-dealing or misuse of office for profit. All of which Trump is demonstrably guilty of.

The Founders wanted a chief administrator, not a Divine Right King.

That a former Attorney General and lifelong Constitutional lawyer would profess uncertainty about this is troubling. At best, it’s disingenuous.

Barr also equivocated on whether he would allow Mueller to indict Trump. This, too, is troubling, since on a previous occasion he interfered with an investigation that would quite possibly have led to indictments of then-President George Bush and former President Ronald Reagan. As reported here:

“Mr. Mueller indicated to Mr. Rivera and to me as well that they would prefer that our indictment — that we work aggressively on it as much as possible… I received a phone call a little bit before noon on August 22 from Denis Saylor who indicated to me that I was directed not to return the BCCI indictment. And I asked who was directing me not to return it, and he said Attorney General William Barr…” (US Atty Lehtinen)

“As Robert Mueller III, the Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department now in charge of the BCCI investigation, testified in October, 1991: BCCI was not an ordinary bank. It was set up deliberately to avoid centralized regulatory review, and operated extensively in bank secrecy jurisdictions. Its affairs are extraordinarily complex. Its offers were sophisticated international bankers whose apparent objective was to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection” (“The BCCI Affair A Report to the Committee on Foreign RelationsUnited States Senate by Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank BrownDecember 1992“) https://archive.org/stream/TheBCCIAffair/The-BCCI-Affair_djvu.txt

It’s important to remember that in 1991-2, Barr was a very partisan lawyer, one who helped Bush write a series of last-minute pardons that effectively destroyed the Iran-Contra investigation, something that threatened to throw some 80 members of the Reagan and Bush administrations, including Reagan himself, in jail.

And now he is in a position to potentially short-circuit Mueller again. Yes, this is cause for concern.

It didn’t help that he was mouthing administration talking points on the wall, immigration in general, and indicated a willingness to make marijuana illegal again.

Well, it’s not like Trump was going to appoint a liberal. It couldn’t have been easy, searching someone who combined plausible credentials with the type of selective moral, ethical and legal blindness needed to serve under Trump.

It may be that it doesn’t matter. Mueller is close to end game, and in any event, even if Barr decided to be a Bork and fire or impair Mueller, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee could simply subpoena Mueller’s records and go from there.

It’s possible I’m being unfair. Yes, Barr was a partisan ratbag in 1992 and contributed to the vast amount of damage the corrupt Reagan and Bush regimes did to the country by making their criminals exempt from the law.

But that was 26 years ago. People change, mature, develop some ethics. Sometimes. Perhaps Barr did, and perhaps he was sincere, if overly lawyerly in today’s testimony. Perhaps the equivocations were those of a man used to dotting eyes and crossing tees.

Perhaps. But Barr needs to know this going in: This isn’t the America of 1992. If he, and the GOP, try to evade justice and put themselves outside of legal reach though obstruction and misuse of the pardon, they won’t walk away. America will come after them.

They aren’t free to spit on the country the way they did in 1992. It’s a different world, and people have learned about the nihilism of the far right.

If Barr lied, he will end up in jail.

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Coda – The end is near

January 14th, 2019

We’re at the point now where there can be no reasonable doubt that Trump’s involvement with the Russians went far beyond normal business contacts, or that he improperly maintained such connections after announcing he was going to run for office, or that he used those contacts to influence the election in his favor.

Now the evidence is mounting that he has been, at the very least, compromised by the Russians, and at the very worst, is an agent for the Russians. The FBI apparently has been investigating him as a possible Russian agent—yes, the President of the United States—since three days after he fired FBI Director James Comey.

That isn’t just opinion: his own words, beginning with his famous, “Russia, if you are listening…” campaign speech, indict him.

It’s becoming evident that his crimes went beyond enlisting the aid of a adversarial foreign power in order to win the election. Since becoming president, he has had at least five secret meeting with Putin, destroying all records of the meeting and forbidding the translator—the only American witness—from discussing what transpired during those meetings. Further, he is known to have transmitted classified material to Putin directly, in one instance doing so in front of cameras, apparently unaware that he was committing a felony.

By the standard usage of the term, he is a traitor, and needs to be immediately removed from office and put on trial. So why hasn’t he?

In a word, Republicans.

They are just now beginning to crumble under the public outrage generated by Trump’s disastrous move to shut down the government over his vanity wall, but in reality if they were loyal Americans with any courage and ethics, they would have impeached him a year ago. Instead, they had a commission, headed by the contemptible Devin Nunes, to actively cover up his crimes. Nunes should be in jail for obstruction of justice. That he took the extreme measures he did to try and protect Trump makes it manifestly clear he did not believe he was protecting an innocent man.

A large number of prominent federal-level Republicans stand to be implicated—and destroyed—by the emerging evidence that they sold their country out to Putin in an effort to cling to power. Pence will go down. And many others.

Mitch McConnell, it turns out, got nearly $3.5 million in dark money from a pro-Putin Ukrainian named Len Blavatnik. This was in additions to the $7.3 million he got in open donations from the Russians through PACs. Interesting fact: McConnell wasn’t even running for office in 2016. Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and Marco Rubio also received smaller amounts of money from Bavatnik. It does explain the servile, toadying behavior of Cruz, Graham and Rubio, doesn’t it?

The NRA laundered nearly $35 million through to the Trump campaign from a Russian group calling itself “Right to Bear Arms.” You have to be a particular kind of stupid to believe that Putin supports or even allows groups that advocated unlimited gun ownership in Russia. The NRA, in turn, gives Republicans marching orders, among which out be to protect the Russian asset, Donald Trump.

Not all elected Republicans are traitors or subversives, of course. Some close their eyes to Trump’s blatantly compromised position and hope he can somehow survive all this and lead the Republicans to permanent white male power in America.

So you have dim bulbs/patsies such as Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, to claims the Steele dossier was commissioned by Democrats to smear Trump. The problem is it wasn’t: New York hedge fund billionaire and Never-Trumper Paul Singer commissioned Steele on behalf of Ted Cruz, and sold it to the Democrats when the Washington Free Beacon, a right wing outfit acting as go-between, pulled out. Johnson’s main defense will be that he really is that stupid.

Vilifying your own intelligence agencies is never a good idea, and even Trump has to sense that denigrating the agencies and smearing and destroying the careers of senior members might not result in kid-gloves treatment, but Republicans are obediently herding behind the lunatic “deep state” conspiracy theory in which only by destroying Trump can the corrupt elites keep control.

No, kiddies, destroying Trump would mean there is just one less corrupt elite.

Republicans are hoping their base is ignorant and stupid enough to keep their purblind support going. There’s evidence that support is cracking, between the unpopularity of the shutdown, and the growing mountain of evidence of “the Russian thing.” Sorry, Ted Cruz, but people outside the beltway do care about collusion. By the way, buy a weedeater. You look like you rimmed a silverback gorilla.

It’s been pointed out that if partisan ratfucker Bob Barr (who helped engineer the midnight pardons of most of the Iran/Contra felons) becomes AG, he’ll fire Mueller. Appointing Barr at this point would nearly be a criminal act in and of itself. You see, all the House Intelligence Committee has to do is subpoena Mueller and all his works, and it all comes out anyway.

There are reports that the Committee already has a lot of damning evidence, suppressed by Nunes but now in the hands of people who aren’t in the pay of Putin and are still loyal to America. A lot of Republicans need to be in prison for a long, long time.

Supporters need to examine their own common sense, loyalties and values. They’ve betrayed themselves at the least, and the rest of us at the most. Adam-Troy Castro wrote a brilliant piece condemning them, available at.

It’s very nearly over. Stay tuned.

 

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End Game – It’s us or him

December 21st 2018

Even by the vicious, arbitrary, capricious and sometimes insane standards of the Trump administration, the past 48 hours were beyond belief.

First, there was the Michael Flynn sentencing. Judge Emmett Sullivan was expected to give the seditious and disgraced General a slap on the wrist as a result of supposedly very valuable evidence provided to the special council’s office in relation to Trump and Russia. But Flynn, whose common sense is the equal of his sense of loyalty to his country, ran his mouth to the press, whining that the FBI fooled him into thinking it was OK to lie to them because he thought the 11 separate interviews they hauled him in for were just friendly chats. Koffee Klatches. They talked about the latest Vogue magazine, you know. Just more proof the FBI was evil. Sullivan’s patience snapped, and he let Flynn know just how big a pile of human shit he really is, delayed sentencing, and let it be known if he spread any more right wing bullshit, he would be treated as a near-traitor.

That happened just a day after California Congresswoman Jackie Spier penned an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle titled, “Did Putin Buy Donald Trump?” She didn’t actually use either the word “traitor” or “kompromat,” but the concepts were definitely intrinsic to her narrative.

So now even the mainstream press is starting to use the word “treason” in relation to Trump. It’s about time.

Trump made Spier’s case for her by suddenly and unilaterally announcing that all troops would be pulled out of Syria, a sudden action that betrayed the Kurds (again) and no doubt delighted Putin. Make no mistake: I’ve argued for pulling troops out of Syria right along, but I don’t for an instant believe that Trump went about it the way he did because he gave a shit about the troops, let alone the Syrians who are dying by the thousands. He did it because Putin wanted him to. And time is running out for him to do stuff like that.

This in turn caused Jim Mattis to quit in disgust. No flowery language about it being an honor and privilege to serve Trump; just a letter that boiled down to, “I can’t help you, get yourself a defense secretary who will do your bidding.” I used to joke about how it came to be that the only adult in the Trump administration, the sane thoughtful one, was known as “Mad Dog” but that Mad Dog might be one of the very few to leave that benighted administration with his reputation as an adult and an American still intact.

It is scary to contemplate Trump’s foreign policy now that his only remaining advisor is John Bolton.

Then Trump blew up the Continuing Resolution. This was a kick-the-can-down-the-road measure to keep the government running while the ludicrous impasse over the Wall continued. Nothing too unusual there: it’s been pretty much what passes for Republican governance since 1993. They love America but hate the United States, and don’t want to pay for anything other than a big military and an economy that consists mostly in the form of raping the workers. So they’ve been running government by extortion, whittling down any stake Americans might have in their own country.

Trump, apparently upset that such intellectual luminaries as Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh no longer loved him, changed his mind after most of Congress had left for their indeterminable vacations, so the government will have a partial shutdown at least until January 10th. It will cost billions, and Trump should reflect on the fact that the Secret Service agents following him won’t be getting paychecks for Christmas.

Even the most stupid mob boss knows you gotta pay your muscle. But then, Trump is extraordinarily stupid.

The stock market is showing signs of a possible crash, having lost 4,000 points this past month. Investors are no longer confident we will survive Trump. That’s not a very comfortable thought.

Then there is the Whitaker thing. The swindler-turned-top-cop had a Department of Justice board of unknown parties say he was not required to recuse himself in the Mueller investigation, then they put out another statement an hour later saying he was supposed to recuse himself, and then an hour after that Whitaker said he was going to disregard the advice to recuse himself.

Kremlin watchers thought as of yesterday that Rosenstein was still overseeing the investigation, since Whitaker didn’t want to go to jail for obstruction, but was acting on the QT since if he did recuse himself, he would get the Jeff Sessions treatment. Now nobody knows that the hell is going on. In some ways, that’s the most terrifying development of all, since it smells like Trump is preparing to purge Mueller’s ass.

Finally, there was the Trump Foundation. A judge shut it down, effectively labeling it a criminal enterprise. I had to shake my head at the wonder of it all. Remember all those Republicans who prattled on endlessly about the Clinton Foundation because it took money (legally) from foreign concerns. For all the huffing, they couldn’t find any quid pro quo, unless you count the ridiculous conspiracy theory about the Canadian government selling uranium to Russia. (Would Trump hesitate to give Russia uranium if Putin asked him for it?). Are they apoplectic in rage over the open criminality of the Trump Foundation?

Hmm. Apparently not. Like cheating on wives or banging porn stars or blowing up the deficit or bombing kids in other countries, or screwing kids domestically, it’s only bad if Democrats are accused of it.

The people who worked directly for Trump aren’t the only ones who trashed their reputations; any Republican who whined endlessly about the Clinton/Obama “scandals” and is silent now can expect decades to pass before anyone wants to hear their thoughts on much of anything again.

Meanwhile, the country is now in deep crisis, and when Congress returns, it may have to put aside the budget and the wall and all that, and drive Trump from office.

It’s him or us.

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Comeuppance – Trump deserves one; America needs one

December 14th 2018

We’re at the point now where there is no longer any reasonable doubt that Trump committed dozens, perhaps hundreds of felonies in his sordid and tawdry life, and at least dozens following his decision to become President. At the very least, he turned his candidacy and presidency into a cash cow. At worst, he conspired against his own country with a hostile foreign power for personal gain.

Yes, I know: ‘Innocent until Proven Guilty.’ But he has admitted—even bragged about—a number of felonies he committed on Twitter. His personal lawyer and his campaign chair have pled guilty to felonies they committed at his behest. He is a liar. He is a thief. His presidency has been an utter disaster, one that has cost America, and Americans, dearly.

It’s the “much worse” items, the ones not already proven in a court of law, that should scare people. If he didn’t openly betray his country, he certainly betrayed the people who voted for him.

So what happens next?

Well, until the past couple of days, when the magnitude of the case against him became more evident, most Republicans and centrist Democrats were saying that impeachment was out of the question. I believed myself that until fear for their own futures outweighed their lust for power, Senate Republicans would never convict, no matter how compelling a case. It’s a sad state of affairs when most of the Senate is on the exact same level as the juries in those old Soviet show trials of the thirties.

It’s part and parcel of the Republican approach to the law in what is supposed to be a nation of laws. They are now openly contemptuous of the law—Orrin Hatch said yesterday that he simply didn’t care if Trump broke the law. He walked it back later, after discovering that the optics were bad, but you can be sure he still feels that way. Republicans sneer at the law, using it only as a device to attack Democrats and anyone else who doesn’t support them. We didn’t see those endless, fruitless investigations into the Clinton and Obama because Republicans loved and respected the law. They just wanted to use it as a cudgel if the found anything, and as a smear if they didn’t. Beyond that, they think the law is for suckers, for the little people.

We didn’t get to this point by accident. Nixon, who probably should have been hanged as a traitor, was dragged into the spotlight, accused of many lesser crimes, including perjury and obstruction of justice. The evidence was overwhelming, and he was forced to resign or be impeached. The nation breathed a sigh of relief. “Our long national nightmare has ended.” Remember that?

Then Ford pardoned him. Nixon would face no charges.

It was a body blow to American’s faith in the system. I remember that evening going to a coffee shop with a friend, and the waitress, who knew us as regulars, asked why we looked so down. “Ford just pardoned Nixon,” I replied. She snarled “Oh, goddammit” and threw the tray down. She ran out to the kitchen, and a few minutes later saw the manager walking her out, talking angrily to her. I was about to get up and defend her, tell the manager I said something that upset her and wanted to apologize but then saw the manager stop dead, stare at her, and as I approached, said, “Really? He did that?” He paused. “OK—clean that up, get back to work.”

It hurt America that that vicious dirtbag walk free.

Then George HW Bush did the same thing, issuing a raft of pardons at the end of his term, kicking the huge Iran-Contra case to splinters and letting many felons and traitors walk free. Instead of keeping his senile ass out of jail, Republicans felt free to talk about putting Reagan on Mount Rushmore, or replace FDR on the dime with their broken hero.

By that time, Republicans knew they were well above the law, but were free to abuse it to hurt others.

The people building the case against Trump know about Republican unearned privilege, too. That’s why a lot of the investigations have been taking place at the state level, where Trump’s power to pardon is annulled.

For Americans who haven’t drunk from the poisoned chalice of Republican entitlement, there is a sense of dread. Dread that Mueller, the Congress, and the other investigatory agencies might bring a damaged case that will let Trump and his minions off on a technicality (remember Ollie North?). The law-and-order crowd, who scream about people getting off on “technicalities” (such as police falsifying evidence, or browbeating simple minded victims into making false confessions) would just love it if Trump walked because a form was filed ten minutes after the deadline.

There remains the argument that a president shouldn’t be indicted. Trump named a ratfucker to the Supreme Court solely on the basis that said ratfucker believed presidents cannot be indicted, only impeached. Same ratfucker who fought for Jones vs. Clinton, upholding the right to sue a sitting president.

They dread that a trial might pull the country apart. A fair trial might; a biased trial certainly would.

They dread he’ll get a slap on the wrist. The sight of the near-treasonous Flynn walking while an abused 16 year old girl gets 51 years for killing her “owner” is a stark reminder of how fucked up justice is in the country, and how far the scales are biased in favor of rich white privilege.

And of course, they dread the pardon. Republicans have abused it to tear the soul out of the country, waitresses, soldiers, any honest person who wants an honest system. It’s possible that Pence will be indicted and convicted alongside Trump, since he’s tits deep in a lot of the emoluments violations, but will Pelosi, as president, have the resolve to allow justice to be done? Centrist Democrats are seen, with good reason, as being too accommodating and obliging to the fascist right, a party of Chamberlains who fail to grasp the nature of their adversaries.

This isn’t just a test of Trump and his sleazy criminal gang; it’s a test of the country, and the countries resolve to administer justice to the rich and powerful.

If they blow it again, that will be strike three.

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The Filings – Grinding the crooks down

December 7th, 2018

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll just quote the fine recapitulation of Donald Trump’s adventures with the law provided by Sabrina Siddiqui, writing for the Guardian:

  • Cohen told investigators he made efforts to contact the Russian government to propose a meeting between Trump and Putin in 2015, after discussing this with Trump.
  • Prosecutors recommended Cohen receive a prison sentence of about four years.
  • The government for the first time implicated the president in Cohen’s campaign finance violations, saying the attorney “acted in coordination with and at the direction” of Trump.
  • Paul Manafort lied to the FBI and to the special counsel’s office, according to a separate filing by Mueller on Friday.
  • The former campaign chairman tried to conceal his contact with an “administration official” inside the White House as late as May 2018, the filing said.
  • Mueller wrote: “Manafort told multiple discernible lies – these were not instances of mere memory lapses.”
  • James Comey, former FBI director, testified before the House judiciary and oversight committees on Friday, and later criticized the process.
  • Trump tweeted attacks on Comey and also wrongly claimed the sentencing memo “clears the president”.
  • John Kelly, White House chief of staff, has been interviewed by Mueller’s team and is expected to quit, CNN reported.
  • George Papadopoulos, former aide to Trump’s campaign, was released from prison on Friday after serving 12 days for lying to the federal government about his contacts with the Russians.
  • Trump nominated William Barr as the next attorney general, selecting a man who served in the role under George HW Bush.

Well, that’s quite a bit to digest. Cohen committed felonies at the behest of “Individual-1”, aka, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States. This means that the President has been officially accused of a felony, since the act of ordering someone to commit a felony on your behalf is, in itself, a felony.

Manafort lied to everyone about pretty much everything. We kinda knew that already, but you know, it doesn’t hurt to recap what a monumental pile of human shit Trump built his presidency upon.

Kelly’s going to quit. Too late to save his reputation, but at least he won’t be sharing a prison cell with Flynn. Granted, Flynn won’t do any jail time, but that just makes him a smarter lickspittle to Trump, not a better one.

Comey went to Congress to answer their questions. They wanted to know about…Hillary’s emails. No shit. I’m not kidding. They’re still rabbiting on about that. Even though it came to light that unsecured emails were common throughout the Trump campaign, and in the Trump administration. Trump doesn’t even use a secured cellphone because he’s too stupid to figure out how it works. The Republicans wonder why they are doing extinct. Despite what they believe, there’s only so much stupid out there.

Trump bragged that the filings today “clears the President” which reaches Baghdad Bob levels of bullshittery. Anyone remember Joe Isuzu? Yeah, that level of in your face lying. Thousands of people lined up on the web to remind Trump of who “Individual-1” actually is. Hint, Donnie: it’s not Hillary Clinton.

Whitaker was apparently just taking up oxygen. I would love to hear the story of how he wound up not systematically trying to destroy the Mueller investigation; I doubt very much that he or Trump had a change of heart and decided justice must take its course. So Trump is going to nominate William Barr, who is basking in the reflected glow of the newly-sainted George HW Bush, now suddenly a hero due to his ability to drop dead at the age of 94. Barr was Bush’s A-G. On the surface, it seems a wise choice: previous experience, and smells of the aroma of the closest thing to a respectable person the Republicans have remaining. Well, until he died, that is.

But here’s the thing you need to know about Barr: he was Attorney-General at the same time that Bush ordered all those pardons, the ones that wiped out nearly 200 felony charges and thousands of lessor charges from dozens of people working in the corrupt, morally bankrupt Reagan administration. In a sane society, Bush would have gone to prison for obstruction of justice, and Barr would have been in the next cell over as his accomplice. So if you think Trump wants a decent, respectable man in the position, stop it. Just stop it.

But here’s the most important thing: George Papadopoulos is FREE! Let the bells ring out, let the children cheer! It seem too good to be true, but he’s free! And one day he’ll show up at your neighborhood bar, drunk off his tits, and tell you the story of how he set Donnie up for a one-night stand with Vladimir Putin and got a nice fur coat in return. I bet you can’t wait.

And some people say there is no god…

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The Plea Bag – Mueller outsmarts them all

November 27th 2018

Like everyone, I’m watching the spiral death dance of the Trump with a mixture of wonder and disgust.

We expected major developments from the Mueller probe this week, and we certainly have been getting those. They just aren’t the ones anyone expected.

What we’re getting is a whole lot more twistier and amusing.

Let’s start with Paul Manafort, once and future felon. Mueller’s office dropped the plea bargain arrangement they had up until yesterday, on the grounds that Manafort had been steadfastly and systematically lying to them.

Of course, there are dozens of theories about why Manafort would lie (nobody, as far as I know, has tried to suggest he wasn’t lying and Mueller is simply wrong). Perhaps Trump has been dangling a pardon, in itself obstruction of justice. Manafort may have been afraid of Trump, or some of Trump’s mob contacts, or perhaps Vladimir Putin. Or he may have just thought he could pull it off.

I can just picture Manafort meeting with one or two members of Mueller’s team. As Manafort talks, the Feds are enrapt, scribbling furiously or clacking their keyboards, even though everything is being videoed. Manafort will correctly assume this means they are taking his testimony very seriously, in a way a silent and unassuming camera eye cannot. It inflates Manafort’s sense of self-importance and self-worth.

Suddenly, the agent with the computer sighs and slaps the laptop shut. He sighs. “Damn thing crapped out again.” He looks at his partner. “Do you have yours handy?”

The partner shakes his head. “Died Wednesday. I was supposed to have one for this meeting. You know how important M thinks it is.”

The first agent turns to Manafort, a sad smile inviting sympathy. “You know how it is. You worked on the campaign. It’s the same here. People screaming at each other, in panic, nothing gets done.” He olds up his number 2 pencil. “Why if it wasn’t for this…”

Manafort nods sympathetically. He was the one sane man in the chaos of the Trump campaign.

Later, the agents make a friendly wager on how long it will take for their little “slip” to turn up in a Trump speech. Mueller runs a tight ship, but the White House leaks more than a geriatric ward, and so they know that Trump is trying to use Manafort as a mole into the Special Prosecutor’s activities.

And of course, it did start showing up in the speeches and trumpentweets. You have to wonder how many other false tidbits Mueller’s people fed to Manafort to confuse and divert the already confused and diverted Trump.

Then there’s the thing with Julian Assange. Mueller’s office filed a court document that accidentally named Assange as being under a sealed indictment. The document didn’t say what the charge(s) was, or when it was filed, and people thought it odd the normally legally meticulous Mueller legal team would make such an error.

But it apparently shook something loose. The Guardian reported yesterday that “Manafort visited Julian Assange three times at the Ecuadorian embassy, including once during the 2016 election.” That right there would send Steven Colbert’s right eyebrow clear up into his hairline. Then it broke that the Trump team had been conferring with Ecuador over their somewhat unwelcome sanctuary guest in their London embassy, meeting with them as recently as yesterday. The speculation is that they are begging Ecuador to NOT release Assange over to American authorities.

Gee, I remember being critical of Obama because he did want Assange turned over to American authorities. Strange times we live in, eh?

Manafort and the Trump people are vociferously denying the report, and given the general ethics and moral characters of those worthies, I can’t help but conclude that it means the report is true. Terribly unfair of me, I know, but when the ball keeps landing in double zero, it’s pretty stupid to bet against the house.

When Mueller asked for a ten day extension on the plea bargain arrangement with Manafort, everyone assumed he just wanted more time to draft his next round of major charges, and was just doing due diligence. We now know that can’t be the case, because we’ve learned that Mueller had proof Manafort was lying, and he knew what Manafort was lying about and when. And because he had to know Manafort was feeding information back to the Trump people through some likely-to-get-disbarred-if-not-imprisoned lawyers, he was systematically convincing Manafort he was being believed, and he was probably feeding disinformation for Manafort to send back to his homies.

So why the ten-day extension? The plea bargain deal was already dead. Why extend it to yesterday?

That’s the deadline for Trump to turn in his written answers to Mueller’s questions about cooperation between the Russians and the Trump campaign.

He turned them in with help from his lawyers who, through Manafort, believed they had a handle on what Mueller did and did not know, and thus had an idea what lies Trump could tell that would be safe.

This right here is a major disaster for Trump, but he really sealed his fate hours after he turned his under-oath answers to Mueller, publicly boasting that his lawyers did not write the responses, but that he did them himself. Every word.

The sad thing (OK, the hilariously sad thing) is that Trump is probably bullshitting and in reality probably just signed off on answers his lawyers wrote and probably had at best a dim understanding of their contents.

But his public boast stripped him of his one and only fig leaf, and the cold blasts of the perjury indictments are coming.

Somewhere in Mueller’s spartan offices, a couple of junior lawyers are holding up a number two pencil, and laughing their asses off. And they may have just helped save the country.

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