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!

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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