Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great mean are almost always bad men…. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

The full quote is thanks to Wikiquotes, which gives us the context of the whole paragraph within which it is embedded.  Of course, we’re quoting this to throw shade on a certain president.  It’s transparently political to bring this up at this time, but there’s no better time to point out that our Dear Leader is trying to assume authoritarian powers like those of the men he admires: Kim Jon Un and Vladimir Putin.

The president is trying to sweep aside the authority of the lower House of Congress to conduct oversight hearings and daring it to impeach him.  He thinks that he has done nothing wrong and rationalizes all the contacts with Russia (except for the secret ones which are still  concealed– see the relevant section of the Mueller report about contacts between Russians and the campaign in which what has transpired is unknown because relevant figures have tried to conceal them or taken the Fifth.  See also our president’s private conversations with Putin of which no transcripts exist.)

We think we know that the Senate will refuse to convict the president if he is impeached… but what if new and damning evidence arises?  The chances of that are fairly slim, in part because any “smoking gun” would have to be of huge caliber to get through the media smokescreen.  There is an alternative, which is to start impeachment proceedings but slow-walk them enough to have a resolution in favor of impeachment delivered to the Senate on the day before Election Day 2020, or even later.  All these things take time, and there is an art to moving things through the political process just in time to be on voter’s minds when they go into the booth.

Nancy Pelosi may be stalling in order to be sure that impeachment hearings are timed to get the maximum exposure during the critical period before the election.  Who knows exactly when would be the right time to do the right thing?

Every day that impeachment is delayed means another assault on government efforts to do the right thing.  (The apparent fact that he cannot be driven out of office by impeachment before the 2020 election is one of the most depressing things I have ever contemplated.)

The latest move in his assault on climate change is his attempts to gain control of the government agencies that produce the 4-year climate assessment.  He’s using the “authority” of a 79-year old physicist who is a climate change “skeptic” to order the climate agency to cut off its predictions at 2040 instead of extrapolating all the out to 2100.   That’s convenient, since the consensus prediction is that the worst of the effects of global warming won’t kick in until 2050 or so.  In addition, the text of the next assessment will be scrubbed of references to “climate change” altogether.  That will make it difficult to discuss their results.

(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)