Donald Trump has given Congress the road to his own perdition, not that he believes in it. He last year regarding the notes kept by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, that good lawyers don’t keep notes. In essence, if you don’t write it down, there’s no evidence.
So, Trump, sly devil, doesn’t take notes; doesn’t put anything in writing; and prefers to conduct “personal diplomacy,” one to one calls or conferences in which no notes are taken or records kept. We recall he directed the translators at his meeting with Putin in Helsinki to destroy his notes.
There’s one thing he had to work around: when the president has a conversation with another head of state, many people are listening, in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room.
Geez, “Rev” Graham, I never heard you cry out one single time when Republicans, who created the most elaborate obstructionist scheme in modern day politics, attacked former President Barack Obama. Oh, I fully understand what your real issue was, because you see, no matter how you slice it or dice it, you said on national television—on the state propaganda network—how “you did not think Barack Obama was really a Christian.”
See folks like me have a great memory of the previous administration, and we have a pretty good memory when somebody is trying to “fleece the flock,” too. And let’s be honest with one another here: You have been doing this for a pretty long time if you were to be completely honest with us. Not that I have any semblance of hope that you will come clean.
About that “fleecing the flock” thingy, since you supposedly preach out of the same Bible I try with all of my heart to live by, you do recall when the Word itself says this in I Peter 5:2, don’t you?
“Care for the flock that God has entrusted to you. Watch over it willingly, not grudgingly—not for what you will get out of it, but because you are eager to serve God.”
Now perhaps it is just me, but I have observed you for several years now, and you know what I found, Sir?
The world sometimes seems to have too few heroes. America has one. He is a minor official in Ukraine.
Between the infamous telephone conversation between two presidents, and the congressional investigation into that conversation, Ukraine had two months to get dirt on Joe Biden. Why did they not even begin?
I know there are more polite ways to put this, but speaking plainly, my president called the head of another country and, while talking about maybe, perhaps, who knows, helping them to survive attacks by Russia, pressured them to manufacture dirt on his main political opponent.
I would like you to do us a favor though.
Congress had authorized $400 million in aid to Ukraine to help them in their struggle to maintain independence from Russia. Putin’s puppet ruler of Ukraine had been overthrown in a popular revolt just a few years ago, and Putin had annexed part of Ukraine shortly after.
Trump ordered those funds held up until he could talk with the newly elected leader of Ukraine. Ukrainian officials were made to understand why the vital assistance was being held up. Donald Trump wanted an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Years back, Hunter had worked for a company doing business in Ukraine.
News Corpse reviews the lies and misrepresentations by my president, and those speaking on his behalf, about the Ukraine call: falsehoods followed by Mr. Trump’s eventual confession.
Green Eagle brings up an almost unnoticed aspect of the attempt to strong-arm Ukraine into manufacturing dirt on Biden. Trump wanted dirt on Ukraine itself. Green Eagle speculates about one bank shot financial reason.
Tommy Christopher has us counting on our fingers as a Fox News personality insists that mainstream media lied about the Ukraine telephone summary. Reports told of multiple references to Joe Biden, but, says Catherine Herridge, there were not multiple references: only a handful, perhaps just three. Let’s see. I used to have multiple fingers. Now I have just a couple of handsful. Or handfuls, depending on whether you use the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Now that Republicans accidentally sent their talking points to Democrats, now that we know in advance what conservatives are supposed to say, Jonathan Bernstein wonders why so many aren’t following the script. Is it the sound of Trump’s spell over Republicans breaking?
While briefly covering how the recently revealed Russian financial connection has endangered NRA IRS exemptions, tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors reveals a talent for exactitude in phraseology, as the NRA Tax Status Commits Suicide.
Okay, Greta Thunberg provides the United Nations her angry denunciation of inadequate action on climate change, citing science and logic on what future generations will face. Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara carefully analyzes the evidence and offers his own scientific view that the 16-year-old is anti-human, ungrateful, and speaks with a voice of a monstrous evil. Not bad for a high school kid.
North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz watches Greta Thunberg stand alone before the gathering of nations. He sees proof of the power of One and suggests that each one of us has it.
First, we have to avoid references to ‘the law’ as if it the same thing here as we think of in every day life. Normally, if you violate the law a cop arrests you or issues a ticket and you talk to what we hope is an impartial judge. You might get a jury of disinterested ‘peers’ and a decision is made and sentence carried out. In this case ‘the law’ is very different. Nobody gets hauled off in cuffs, not even a ticket. And there is no judge. Only a jury of, in this case, 100 senators of whom the majority are both not disinterested and profoundly disinclined to see anything wrong with what Trump has done. And Pence.
And no, the GOP cannot be shamed into voting for America and against their party. There is literally no violation that can’t be rationalized. It really doesn’t matter what the law says. Either he/they didn’t do it, or they did it but it is religiously justified (God allows sin to be used to accomplish a greater good), or ethnically justified (remember that Russia and the GOP are all Christian white guys), or the violation of law is just part of the game where the real payoff is making liberals cry and impeachment is just another failed attempt to smear the GOP by a feckless and ineffectual Democratic party.
Second, there is the timing. Start impeachment now and it will be all over before it has much effect of the 2020 election.
If Trump thinks this is a perfectly ordinary and unremarkable call with a foreign leader, I am terrified to contemplate what all his other conversations sound like.
The whistleblower’s letter is now available to be read online. I’m hoping this becomes a historic document and isn’t just swept under the rug, as the Republicans and president would like.
Pelosi’s declaration of an impeachment inquiry is a good move both practically and politically. On the practical side, it will broaden the House Democrats’ legal powers to investigate Trump — which is why I’ve always supported it. On the political side, it should, at least for a while, take some of the pressure off of House Democrats to proceed to an actual impeachment.
For anyone not familiar with my objections to an impeachment, here’s a summary:
(a) Impeachment can’t remove Trump from office. Removal would take at least 20 Republican votes in the Senate, which isn’t going to happen because Senate Republicans are afraid to anger Trumpanzees whose votes they depend on for re-election.
(b) After “acquittal” by the Senate, Trump would bleat endlessly that he had been exonerated and that all the accusations against him had been exposed as fake news, a dastardly Democratic plot, etc. This would sound plausible to millions of swing voters who don’t pay close attention to politics. Thus an impeachment would probably make Trump’s re-election more likely.
(c) Impeachment would threaten our House majority. Many House Democrats represent purplish districts in which a vote to impeach would be a definite liability next year. Impeachment is generally unpopular with the voters — including with many Democrats and independents, not just Republicans.
It’s clearly (c) which has loomed largest in Pelosi’s resistance to impeachment. She’s been accused of doing the politically expedient thing rather than the right thing, but keeping that Senate majority is important. A lot of lives will be ruined or lost if Republicans recover full control of the government.
Do we? Really? Just another crime committed by the Thug in Chief, shaking down the Ukrainian President to go get Joe Biden if he wants his missiles “for defense”. Ya know that $400 million? Well I directed my bitch chief of staff to hold that up for now. I also want you to work with my consigliori lawyer and my enforcer Attorney General to get this “favor” done for me.
Goddamn, this guy has always been a mafia boss, running around New York deadbeating out on his bills, putting the screws to government, making racist statements about young black men, bragging about the height of his building as 3000 people lay dead, filing bankruptcy whenever convenient and running a scam foundation that lined his pockets (which may really be why he goes to prison). The fact that normally decent men and women on the right have stood on this hill of toxicity keeping the wolves at bay is really amazing. NOw is when real people step up and say NO MORE!!
Nancy Pelosi announces a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump (Click for Vox.com)
From author John Scalzi at Whatever:
Back here in the US, folks on the left have been riding Nancy Pelosi on the subject of impeachment basically since the moment she got the gavel back, and are exasperated that it’s taken her this long to start an inquiry. I certainly sympathize, since Trump is objectively a terrible president, incompetent as balls and also corrupt in a way we haven’t seen in the White House in most people’s lifetimes (yes, even worse than Nixon). But Pelosi isn’t stupid, and she knows a thing which people on the left sometimes forget, which is that impeachment isn’t actually popular with most Americans, and also, Republicans, while institutionally corrupt, are both not actually stupid, and also really good at winding up their base about how THEY ARE UNDER ATTACK FROM THE SOCIALIST FEMINIST PELOSI AND HER ALLIES IN THE FAKE NEWS. Pelosi also knows that no president that’s been impeached has been removed from office, and that when Clinton’s impeachment trial was done, he was more popular than when it started.
All of which is to say that I suspect Pelosi recognizes, more than most people, the political hazards of an impeachment inquiry. They are significant and they are substantial, and, bluntly, if the Democrats fuck it up, they hand Trump a gift going into an election year… and we all know what the capacity of Democrats to fuck up even sure things is. She also recognizes that the Senate is in Republican hands and that in these benighted days, the chances of them removing a Republican president, even one as manifestly corrupt and incompetent as Trump, are slim approaching none. So the only realistic victory scenario here is to have an impeachment inquiry come up with something that is so unambiguously corrupt and unlawful that when the Republicans in the Senate vote to keep Trump in the White House — and they will — they slit their own political throats in the process.
Which is, uhhhhh, a lot.
So while I’m delighted that Pelosi has finally pulled the trigger on an impeachment inquiry, I am from a purely realpolitik view sympathetic regarding her reluctance to do so before now. And even now it’s far from a slam dunk.
