February 14th 2019<\/p>\n
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\u2019t do that, I\u2019m still covered: I can keep the main title and just write an entirely different piece. It\u2019s all good.<\/p>\n
It\u2019 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 \u2018border security.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019s final gambit: this state of emergency.<\/p>\n
The idea is that Trump can use the declaration to strip funds away from other emergencies, such as Puerto Rico\u2019s hurricane relief, or the fires in California.<\/p>\n
Even by his standards, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The question remains: how many Republicans will follow him into this new sewer of a rabbit hole?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
McConnell, the biggest whore in the Senate, declared proudly, “I indicated to him I am going to support the national emergency declaration.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m guessing that Grassley knew exactly why McConnell was interrupting him and didn\u2019t like it one little bit. Earlier this morning, at a prayer function of the sort that afflicts representative democracy, he said, \u201cLet’s all pray that the president will have wisdom to sign the bills so government doesn’t shut down.\u201d 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\u2019t willing to sacrifice Chuck Grassley for the sake of the party. He knows that if Pissmop\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Hence his barely concealed disgust for the obsequious McConnell.<\/p>\n
In an unrelated development, Atlantic magazine printed an excerpt from Andrew McCabe\u2019s book, \u201cThe Threat\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n
McCabe wrote, \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n
In a telling vignette, McCabe wrote:<\/p>\n
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\u2014he actually used the word hate.<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2014to communicate that the door was always open, so that he wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/em><\/p>\n 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?<\/em><\/p>\n 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.<\/em><\/p>\n Then McGahn turned and looked at me. And Trump looked at me and asked, Is that what you\u2019re telling me? Do you think it is a good idea?<\/em><\/p>\n