From Washington Post reader and commenter “Dave Longtin”:
@smeener As a conservative Democratic Party mega-donor, I know that Trump will not get impeached. Doing so would only ensure the Donald’s 2020 re-election, as sports and political statistician Nate Silver has warned. In 1869, after the American Civil War, President Andrew Johnson, a Southern sympathizer, essentially tried to let England off the hook for supplying warships to the Confederacy by forming an Anglo-American commission to study the issue, a move that Congress overwhelmingly rejected. Does that seem at all similar to Putin’s disingenuous offer to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation? In 1872, Britain finally agreed to compensate the United States for its illegal aid to the South during the conflict. Trump’s obsequious posture toward Putin truly shocks the entire planet, but it is not unprecedented in the long scope of American history. In no way am I excusing Trump, yet observers should use caution when claiming that anything the Donald has done is novel. He is not that clever – https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/alabama-claims Nixon committed many of the same crimes as Trump, including secretly conspiring with the South Vietnamese regime to scuttle peace talks, handing Nixon a narrow win in 1968 over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Instead of ending the conflict as he promised, Nixon expanded the war, secretly bombing Cambodia and unwittingly helping the genocidal Khmer Rouge to seize Phenom Penh, a regime that murdered two million of its own citizens – https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vietnam-candidate-conspired-with-foreign-power-win-election-215461 The Kremlin expected Trump to lose in 2016. It was FBI Director James Comey’s second 28 October 2016 letter to Congress, implying to careless listeners that Hillary Clinton had somehow broken the law with her private email server that boosted Trump the most – https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/ Comey regrets it now.
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@getarake Yes, unfortunately, it is true. Nevada Democratic Congresswoman Susie Lee (NV – CD 3) told me that the Donald will not get impeached. I lose sleep worrying about what Trump will do next. The GOP tax law, the Donald’s tariffs, his incoherence, and his government shutdown are destroying this country in ways you can hardly imagine. If the government remains closed throughout 2019, we will gradually lose the ability to practice modern medicine over the next forty or fifty years. Unlike other pharmaceuticals, antibiotics are not profitable, in part because they are the sole class of drugs that lose effectiveness the more they get used. They also are the only pharmaceuticals that actually cure people – when they work. Most other medicines simply manage chronic conditions. Humanity will survive antimicrobial resistance, but it won’t live well. Far from I having a vested interest in solving this issue, I have spent thousands of dollars trying to fix the moribund antibiotics pipeline, with the assistance of retired infectious diseases expert David M. Shlaes, who is one of the last people on Earth with the knowledge to make usable antibiotics. During Dr. Shlaes’ more than three-decade career, he helped to shepherd several broad-spectrum antibiotics with novel mechanisms of action to market, including tigecycline, avibactam, and eravacycline. Another promising antimicrobial agent in which Dr. Shlaes played a part was lefamulin, but that has not yet been FDA-approved, and might become more collateral damage of the shutdown. Any conflicts of interest that Dr. Shlaes had have now been eliminated, because he is retired and spends much of his free time relaxing with his precious horse. There is a dirt-cheap legislative solution to this global tragedy, but it won’t happen if this standoff continues much longer. Read Dr. Shlaes’ latest two blog posts, if you want to panic like me. Dr. Shlaes has lost all hope –http://antibiotics-theperfectstorm.blogspot.com/
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@LarrySP No, I don’t read Chomsky. Trump can’t simply rule by decree, because he is hemorrhaging support within the U.S. Armed Forces. This survey was taken before Trump fired the wildly popular Jim Mattis two months early, before the Donald point-blank lied to our troops about a pay increase they never received, and before he used them as stage props on the Mexican border, a mission they despised as a gratuitous political stunt – https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2018/10/15/support-for-trump-is-fading-among-active-duty-troops-new-poll-shows/ https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2019/01/07/trump-reasserts-he-can-use-military-funds-to-build-the-southern-border-wall/ As Ted Koppel writes, Trump will incite his followers to violence if he loses the 2020 election – https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-expect-trump-to-go-quietly/2019/01/14/d8104e3a-1458-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html?utm_term=.2f23e86600bb Regardless of political affiliation, the more educated you are, the less likely you are to back the Donald. In most states, the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Trump in 2016. Cops are blue collar workers, typically without much formal education, and probably would fight for Trump. Far-right militias already have acquired undetectable and untraceable weapons, capable of killing thousands of civilians at once – http://www.fox9.com/news/investigators/minnesota-3-percenters-say-theyre-ready-for-civil-war Welcome to my personal Hell, scared silly over events that I alone can’t stop.
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@LarrySP Congress already has prohibited Trump from withdrawing American troops from South Korea – https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/08/15/trump-objects-new-law-stops-him-removing-troops-south-korea.html Legal scholars have concluded that Trump could unilaterally pull the United States out of the 70-year-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization, against the will of the American people and the Armed Forces itself – https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/16/trump-cant-do-that-can-he-nato-russia-congress/ Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opposes Trump on this issue – https://www.wpsdlocal6.com/2018/07/17/mcconnell-praises-nato-says-russia-no-us-friend/Last year, the Senate passed a non-binding measure to thwart the Donald by a 97 to 2 margin, with only Kentucky’s Raul Paul and Utah’s Mike Lee actively opposing it. Virginia Democratic Senator Tim Kaine has introduced a new legally binding bipartisan bill to prevent Trump from doing so, with the blessing of Cory Gardner (R-CO), Jack Reed (D-RI), Lindsey Graham, (R-SC), Chris Coons (D-DE), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Susan Collins (R-ME). Democratic New Jersey Senator Bob Mendendez, another cosponsor, may go to prison soon. After initially dropping the corruption charges against Senator Mendendez, the Donald’s Justice Department has reinstated them – https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-department-says-it-will-re-try-sen-robert-menendez-following-mistrial-on-bribery-charges/2018/01/19/240fce5c-fd51-11e7-a46b-a3614530bd87_story.html?utm_term=.f53491a4b7cd I am desperately contacting Democratic Senators, urging them to support Tim Kaine’s putative pro-Atlantic Alliance law – https://www.stripes.com/news/senators-want-legislation-to-block-trump-over-feared-nato-pullout-1.564994
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@LarrySP Actually, I have no clue where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stands on NATO. He has supported the Alliance in the past, but also trusts that the Donald will not pull out – https://thehill.com/policy/defense/315008-mcconnell-breaks-with-trump-on-nato https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-nato-senate/mcconnell-says-not-worried-about-trump-withdrawing-u-s-from-nato-idUSKBN1K02N6
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@Critical Rationalist The Mueller report might get buried, if Trump has his way. You might not appreciate that legal constraints under which that investigation operates, now that the independent counsel statute no longer exists – https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/special-counsel-less-independent-under-expired-watergate-era-law-n761311 Because Trump’s people answer no subpoenas voluntarily, these legal experts warn that House Democrats would have to incarcerate those closest to the Donald, destabilizing society – https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/be-warned-congress-subpoenas-may-not-uncover-the-trump-administrations-secrets/2018/11/29/8b5f39f8-f3ff-11e8-80d0-f7e1948d55f4_story.html?utm_term=.1aed9cc9f82c Multiple House members have assured me that they won’t physically detain anyone, because of the fierce backlash that would result. The best course is to let the Democratic Attorneys General of Maryland and the District of Columbia expose the Donald’s shady business deals, because Brian Frosh and Karl Racine can imprison all sorts of recalcitrant folks. On Brian Frosh’s advice, I have donated to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), who are acting in tandem with Frosh and Racine – https://www.citizensforethics.org/ No President or Vice President has ever spent a single day in jail, no matter how illicit their activities have been. The greatest threat to Trump are all of the state-based civil lawsuits he faces that no president can pardon. New York State’s Democratic Attorney Letitia James seeks not to imprison the Donald, but to ensure that he dies in poverty, a fate worse than any jail, since he cares about nothing except his money – https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/incoming-new-york-attorney-general-plans-wide-ranging-investigations-trump-n946706
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@BLACKCAT66 At times like these, humor sometimes helps. Watch Trump stand in the middle of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and shoot himself in the foot over the government shutdown – https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorial-cartoons/jim-morin/article224880110.html Expecting heavy Russian interference in the 2018 midterm elections, I gave some Democrats too much help, even though the Kremlin did not meddle very much last year. Putin might save his best bolt for 2020, but by then, I hope that most Americans don’t fall for it – https://www.cfr.org/blog/year-review-cyber-threats-and-mid-term-us-elections The longer the government shutdown continues, the more society will crumble around us – https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/trump-approval-falls-to-36-percent-in-new-poll-1430479939914
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@Critical Rationalist Sure, House Democrats will invite Bob Mueller to testify, but Trump’s followers don’t seem to mind that the Donald conspired with Putin – https://www.npr.org/2018/12/07/674315848/poll-republicans-are-only-group-that-mostly-sees-mueller-probe-as-a-witch-hunt And you seriously believe that Trump is the first American politician to threaten the Constitution and the rule of law? On 10 October 1798, President John Adams imprisoned popular Vermont Congressman Matthew Lyon merely for supporting Adams’ rival Thomas Jefferson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lyon Kindly read this Op-ed piece in The New York Times. Liberals demonized their opponents as racists, fascists, and even Nazis far too much – https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/opinion/liberal-pessimism-poland.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage If we Democrats aren’t careful, the next autocratic figure could emerge from within our Party. Taking office in 1928, Louisiana Governor Huey Long was a Democrat. He also was a quasi-fascist and a Bernie Sanders-type dictator on steroids. He was not a racist, because he took on the Ku Klux Klan, that actually was a brave thing to do at the time. He wanted to help African-Americans under his regime. But he guaranteed every Louisianan a minimum annual income of $5,000, an impossibly high sum in that era. Initially, he supported President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal program, but came to believe that the New Deal did not go far enough. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1932, but retained his ironclad grip on Louisiana politics through his surrogates and a compliant State legislature until his assassination in 1935 – https://www.thenation.com/article/huey-long-death-demagogue/ I could go on citing American historical precedents, but they just seem to bounce off of you. At least two potential Democratic presidential candidates have autocratic tendencies, Michael Bloomberg and Oprah Winfrey.
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@Critical Rationalist Michael Bloomberg agrees with Trump about stop and frisk police tactics – https://thehill.com/homenews/news/426559-bloomberg-touts-drop-in-nyc-murder-rate-in-defending-stop-and-frisk And Oprah Winfrey has a reputation as a “benevolent dictator,” because she runs her business enterprises that way – https://bolesblogs.com/2007/11/26/oprah-winfrey-as-benevolent-dictator/ She also spouts a lot of dangerous pseudoscientific nonsense – https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/9/16868216/oprah-winfrey-pseudoscience Although Oprah has said that running for the Oval Office is not in her DNA, that could be false modesty. Should she ever change her mind, Oprah’s public approval rating is sky-high – https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/5/18064296/trump-axios-poll-2020-oprah-michelle-obama
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@guiwhiz You overestimate my importance. I gave to centrist and conservative elements within the Democratic Party last year, only because I thought that other Americans shared my basic worldview. Kirsten Gillibrand, who used to be one of the most conservative House Democrats when she represented a red district in upstate New York, has transformed herself into the single most liberal member of the Senate, voting with Trump only 11.4% of the time. She has gone through contortions, trying to explain away her vast ideological shift. By contrast, Arizona’s Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema was once a “Prada Socialist,” as she now calls her former self. Unlike Gillibrand, Ms. Sinema does not disavow her progressivist past. In 2003, she simply decided that she was too liberal to win elections in purple Arizona, and changed to appeal to her constituents. She now votes with Trump 60% of the time. She could not have narrowly defeated Martha McSally, who votes with Trump a whopping 96% of the time with Gillibrand’s current leftist record –https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/ Unlike Trump, I alone cannot fix it. One individual can alter some policy specifics, but the grand course of history is shaped by impersonal factors, however uninspiring that truth may be. Arrogant Democratic mega donor George Soros, with a personal fortune of $8 billion, had a massive civil-society organization that had been operating in his native Hungary since 1984. That’s right, the Soviet-backed Communist regime invited his staff to come. But his group recently announced that it was fleeing his homeland of less than ten million people, after failing to prevent Hungary from becoming an “illiberal democracy” – https://www.rferl.org/a/soros-hungary-berlin-open-society-closing-office-budapest/29180332.html
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@guiwhiz You seem not to realize that Florida’s GOP has tried mightily to stop ex-felons from exercising their newly won right to vote – https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/florida-restored-voting-rights-to-former-felons-now-the-gop-wants-to-thwart-reform/2019/01/13/84e2dcdc-1520-11e9-803c-4ef28312c8b9_story.html?commentId=4fb61115-538b-468a-a48c-315d7948dc20&outputType=comment&utm_term=.758675d7fdff Tallahassee Republicans aren’t just thwarting the people’s will, they also are endangering society by increasing the recidivism rate among disgruntled ex-felons who mistakenly thought that they had gained the ability to cast ballots. After donating a small fortune to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, the only bipartisan organization pushing for a “Yes” on that referendum, I have again contributed substantially to the Florida Chapter of the ACLU, who is trying to fix this bloody mess – https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election/article211408754.html https://www.aclufl.org/en/press-releases/aclu-florida-statement-gov-elect-ron-desantis-comment-amendment-4-implementation
Early this morning, Roger Stone was arrested on seven counts of lying to Congress and witness tampering. He bailed out with $250,000 and travel restrictions. Later this morning, he who must not be named announced a three-week pause in the ongoing government shutdown. He made this announcement in a way that suggested that he had won the battle with Nancy Pelosi. The battle, however, is not over. Shortly comes the 29th of January, the day on which He wants to make His State of the Union address in the House chamber. The question I have, is will you cave, Nancy? Or will you tell him he can’t use his “bully pulpit” until the shutdown is well and truly over?
Update: an announcer on MSNBC just said that it was Roger Stone who came up with the idea of the wall four years ago and suggested it to Him.
From an opinion article highlighting how his lies about “business in Russia” betrayed voters, in the Washington Post, by a writer named “radcabasa”, probably written yesterday:
Unfortunately his voter do not care if he lies, if he deals with Russia,, if he pays off mistresses, if he cheats on taxes. They don’t care about any of this and he knows it, They only care that he keeps the pressure on all those others (liberals and darker skinned people) they see as the real enemies.
Just sayin’.
When you think about it, the whole thing makes perfect sense: he who must not be named is being true to the radical conservatives’ famous goal, “to shrink the government to the size that it can be drowned in a bathtub.” By shutting down the 1/4 of government that the House didn’t finish appropriating money for, he has been able to hold citizens hostage to special funding appeals and online fundraising drives and forcing even his personal security guards to work without pay.
The whole point is to impair government, to weaken it, to shrink it. For some reason these people have not accounted for the economic effect of shutting down government, or else they don’t care. A White House economic expert said that the first quarter might show zero growth if the shutdown continues.
By coincidence, this aligns with the goals of Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation. Relative weakening and disunity in the United States fits right in with his aims. Whether this makes he who must not be named an agent of Russia depends to some extent on how much they have given him.
The numerous apartments sold to Russian figures, as well as the sale of a mansion in 2008-9, make the total amount of payments from Russian sources over the years quite large. More recent subsidies, such as the $20 million given through the NRA, swell the totals. Then there are the payments into the inaugural fund– totalling $100 million from all sources, only half of which was actually used for the inauguration.
The bottom line is bottomless corruption and treasonous collaboration with the Russians, before and after he was elected.
The way forward begins with intensive investigations by the House Oversight Committee, followed by consideration of an impeachment resolution by the– relevant committees in the House. To be most effective, we should move slowly and try to time the consideration of an impeachment resolution by the full House shortly before the 2020 elections– perhaps in the spring of 2020. That is only a year and a half from now.
Now is the time to be resolute. Offer the president $5.7 billion in extra border security funding but NOT a wall– more agents, better ports, more judges, more detention barracks, everything except a wall. Repair and reinforcing of existing barriers, but no new barriers. Drones, manned patrols, balloons, more of everything mobile and service-related, but no new walls.
At the same time, the government must be opened so that investigations can be continued– without funding, the FBI has been hamstrung. So accepting his wall might be a necessary sacrifice to make for the funding to further investigate him. One comfort is that Mueller has probably done enough investigating already to write, in Rudy Giuliani’s word, a “horrific” report. Even Barr will be so disgusted he will be forced to release the report.
Reminds me of something John Sherman (U.S. Senator) said about James Buchanan: “The Constitution provides for every accidental contingency in the executive — except a vacancy in the mind of the president.” Sound like anyone we know?
The following extended quotations from an article in Daily Kos yesterday by Frank Vyan Walton:
In his new article, “Personal values and support for Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential primary,” published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, psychologist Ryne Sherman explains “a prototypical Trump supporter” as someone with “little interest in supporting social welfare programs,” “a strong desire for power,” “a strong desire to make money,” various “concerns about personal and financial safety” and a “preference for strictly adhering to social conventions (i.e., order, structure, and following the chain of command).”
Trump’s Republican and conservative supporters share the following attributes:
- They are more likely to be authoritarians and to embrace other extreme right-wing ideologies.
- They are racially resentful and hostile to nonwhites. This attitude is especially pronounced towards African-Americans.
- They exhibit forms of toxic behavior associated with “collective narcissism.”
- They believe that white people are the real victims of racism in America.
- They are political bullies who engage in social dominance behavior against individuals and groups they view as Other (nonwhites and immigrants, Muslims, gays and lesbians) or their political enemies (liberals and progressives).
- They hold sexist and misogynistic views.
- Trump’s most extreme and enthusiastic supporters in the “alt-right” feature the “dark triad” of personality traits: narcissism, a propensity for violence, and a Machiavellian longing to manipulate others.
- They have little regard for America’s democratic norms and institutions and believe that winning at costs is all that matters — even if that means siding with a foreign power such as Russia to elect Donald Trump
- They live in regions of the United States where people are more likely to be unhappy, miserable and physically unwell and to suffer from the “deaths of despair.”
- They are attracted to Trump’s threats of violence and his other antisocial behavior.
- They are anti-intellectual, disdainful of higher education and hostile towards experts.
- They possess a deep fear of death and social obsolescence which compels them towards “strong leaders,” guns, superficial expressions of patriotism and Christian fundamentalism
- They are extremely gullible and thus vulnerable to disinformation and other lies, as disseminated through the right-wing media.
- They seek simple answers to complex problems and are quick to reject new and inconvenient information.
- Either directly or indirectly, they want to hurt others whom they consider “un-American” or outside their tribe and community.
The dark truth of this shutdown has been revealed by a “senior Trump official” in his own words in a Daily Caller op-ed, where he revealed that the shutdown isn’t an incidental byproduct of Trump’s wall fight—it’s part of a larger goal of hollowing out the government in order to shrink and hobble the “Deep State.”
As one of the senior officials working without a paycheck, a few words of advice for the president’s next move at shuttered government agencies: lock the doors, sell the furniture, and cut them down. Federal employees are starting to feel the strain of the shutdown. I am one of them. But for the sake of our nation, I hope it lasts a very long time, till the government is changed and can never return to its previous form.
The lapse in appropriations is more than a battle over a wall. It is an opportunity to strip wasteful government agencies for good.
[…]
Saboteurs peddling opinion as research, tasking their staff on pet projects or pitching wasteful grants to their friends. Most of my career colleagues actively work against the president’s agenda. This means I typically spend about 15 percent of my time on the president’s agenda and 85 percent of my time trying to stop sabotage, and we have no power to get rid of them. Until the shutdown.
[…]
But President Trump can end this abuse. Senior officials can reprioritize during an extended shutdown, focus on valuable results and weed out the saboteurs. We do not want most employees to return, because we are working better without them. Sure, we empathize with families making tough financial decisions, like mine, and just like private citizens who have to find other work and bring competitive value every day, while paying more than a third of their salary in federal taxes.
President Trump has created more jobs in the private sector than the furloughed federal workforce. Now that we are shut down, not only are we identifying and eliminating much of the sabotage and waste, but we are finally working on the president’s agenda.
It is worthwhile to re-read this piece in the Washington Post from May 17, 2017; since it is short, I will quote it in full:
KIEV, Ukraine — A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016, exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy.
Before the conversation, McCarthy and Ryan had emerged from separate talks at the Capitol with Ukrainian Prime Minister Vladimir Groysman, who had described a Kremlin tactic of financing populist politicians to undercut Eastern European democratic institutions.
News had just broken the day before in The Washington Post that Russian government hackers had penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee, prompting McCarthy to shift the conversation from Russian meddling in Europe to events closer to home.
Some of the lawmakers laughed at McCarthy’s comment. Then McCarthy quickly added: “Swear to God.”
Ryan instructed his Republican lieutenants to keep the conversation private, saying: “No leaks. . . . This is how we know we’re a real family here.”
The remarks remained secret for nearly a year.
One could ask, “Who knew, what did they know, and when did they know it?” Apparently, however, the fact that He is getting money from the Russians was an open secret long before the election. The entire Republican Party, plus the National Rifle Association, have been compromised by the Russians– and a lot of people knew this was happening before the election, and didn’t tell the general public.
It has finally become clear: the president of the United States is a Russian asset. The government shutdown is an attempt to weaken our country vis-a-vis both Russia and China. There is no precedent and no worldview capable of comprehending this shocking fact.
The whole Trump administration is secretly an attempt to weaken our country and make it more difficult for us to defend other countries who are threatened by the projection of Russian and Chinese power.
This is the truth revealed by all the evidence that has finally come to the surface. Every bit of evidence has pointed the same way; at first, it was just a suggestion. By the day of the 2016 presidential election, it was already clear that an unfit, unbalanced individual was being promoted as a candidate for the presidency by Russian operatives on the internet (I’m referring to Facebook, Twitter, and so on.) It wasn’t until a year later that the truth began to really pour out: the meeting in Trump Tower between Natalya Veselnitskaya and Donald Trump Jr., the conduct of Mariiya Butina at the NRA and elsewhere, the communication between Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik, and so on.
There is no mistaking the truth of it now: This is what the Russians do, and this is what He who must not be named does.
Out of all of the characters in this depressing story of American betrayal, there is one figure that unexpectedly rises to the top. We know about our imbecile president and his long trail of self-dealing, corrupt, criminal cohorts. Their crimes are obvious and out in the open. Their crimes, when all comes to light, will most likely be good ‘ole money theft. Greed. Follow the money, right? But the most malignant character in our civic life over the past 10 years is Mitch McConnell. He has done the most damage to our country. Deep wound, lasting damage. Calling him unpatriotic is not enough and I personally believe he is a traitor in the true sense of the word. The founding fathers would be sickened by a character like McConnell. I have a feeling history will look back at his legacy and use the example of his un-American behavior as something that had to be prevented legislatively. HIs last name will be an adverb. The state of Kentucky is a great place filled with great people…I still can’t understand how they keep re-electing this demon given all of the damage he has done.
(and another:)
The failure of the Senate Republicans to prevent sanctions being lifted from Russian oligarch and Putin confidante, Oleg Derispaka, indicates just how far and just how frightening the Republican Party has become (to be generous) “unwitting” agents of Russia. It was Deripaska who worked with convicted criminal Paul Manafort and maybe the conduit through which Putin had him appointed Donald Trump’s campaign chair. It was Deripaska who sued Manafort for millions owed to him and who Manafort sought to pay back with access to the campaign including it appears polling data and a change in the party platform. We just learned that the F.B.I. was so alarmed that Trump might be a Russian agent after he fired their director, James Comey, that they started a counter-intelligence investigation into the president. Now it seems that Republican party itself may be Russian agents. Along with their reluctance to reopen the federal government, one cannot avoid the very terrifying thought that our elected officials are not working to “serve and protect” us.
(and yet another:)
@JFK The Republicans are people who want – no desperately need – oligarchs to fund their political campaigns because only massive amounts of money can keep them in power. Their policies are very unpopular when people truly understand them, so everything has to be done with smoke and mirrors. That takes money. They do not care where the money comes from. They do not care what they have to do to keep it coming. They care only for the power it gives them. Don’t believe this? Then why won’t McConnell allow a floor vote on the House bill to open the government – the same bill they passed unanimously in December? It isn’t because they are unaware of the danger to the country. They know they are ruining the economy; they know millions of people are paying the price for this shutdown; they just do not care.
The problem with our country is not the sleazy president, the FBI, or even Putin and the Russians. The problem with our country is the quisling, feckless, traitorous Republicans, led by the biggest traitor of all, Senator Mitch McConnell.
We now know that Mitch McConnell was approached by leaders in the FBI and asked to make a joint statement, with President Obama, about Russia’s attack on America and their interference in our election, before our presidential election in 2016. McConnell refused. Vote every Republican out of office and save America, and our Republic.
“If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” — David Frum
(This incident followed hard upon McConnell’s refusal to even consider Obama’s nominee for Supreme Court Justice because he only had eleven months to go before the end of his second term– a breach of Senate procedure that should have landed him in jail or at least ejected from Congress.)
(Now there is the odd situation in the middle of the shutdown with McConnell refusing to help get the government back running. He has been invisible for 22 days now and is said to refuse to bring up anything that He won’t sign– why is he afraid of a veto, which could probably be easily over-ridden at this point?)
(The book “House of T—, House of Putin” claims that McConnell became a salaried employee of the Kremlin just prior to the Republican convention in 2016.)
(Not only did McConnell refuse to sign a joint statement condemning Russian meddling, he directly threatened then-CIA director Brennan:
“If you try to come forward with this, I’m not going to sign on to any public statement that would condemn Russian interference. But I will condemn you and the Obama administration for trying to mess up this election.”
this according to a book by Washington Post writer Greg Miller, “The Apprentice”)
The New York Times yesterday carried a story revealing that the FBI began a counterintelligence investigation of He who must not be named after he fired Attorney General James Comey. His behavior was so erratic and his statements so sympathetic to the Kremlin that FBI agents suspected he was acting as an agent of Russia. So His claim that “Comey assured me three times that I was not under investigation” was false on its face. There should be no surprise among neutral observers at the revelation of the FBI’s investigation. The only question is how active the counterintelligence investigation is now, under the supervision of Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, since Sessions recused himself.
Theoretically, the investigation has continued under the direction of Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor charged with studying the cooperation between the Republican presidential campaign and the Russian government in 2016– and the potential obstruction of justice revealed by His firing of Comey in May 2017. Mueller has also been authorized to investigate “matters arising” from the central investigation, although he handed off the prosecution of His lawyer, Michael Cohen, to the Southern District of New York’s federal attorney before Cohen’s office and home were searched.
He himself pointed investigators to a gold-mine of information when he stated that looking into his finances would “cross a red line.” His long-time financial advisers and accountants were quickly immunized and have been cooperating with Mueller.
Since this occurred almost two years ago, we might ask whether the investigation has ended or has been completed. This is very unlikely, based on the past history of such secret probes. Counterintelligence investigations can go on for ten years or more and may never end with a public statement, much less an indictment. Since Mueller has been famously silent after he was tapped to lead the investigation, there are no hints as to whether it continues or how productive it has been.
Still, the indictments and subpoenas issued from Mueller’s office suggest that the investigation has been productive and has not ended.
The partial government shutdown, which is now the longest in US history, is His latest gift to Russia. National security has been impaired, the government is in chaos, and He is carving out exceptions to the “no-funding” rules that hold during a shutdown. The latest exception, sought by heavy lobbyists in the financial services industry, allows the IRS to send copies of federal tax returns to companies that are verifying income for people seeking mortgages and other types of secured loans. IRS employees have been called back to work– with pay– to process requests for copies of returns that allow these financial companies to complete their loans. Another carve-out has allowed National Park Service employees to return to work, paid by visitor fees for maintenance and cleanup, even though the fees have been legally restricted to other purposes. These individual exceptions are being processed as favors to lobbyists and to mitigate the public scandal that the shutdown has caused.
The other overlooked gift to Russia is the administration’s attempt to lift sanctions on Oleg Deripaska (only imposed six months ago) that were imposed by Congress because of his interference in the 2016 election. If the Congress doesn’t object within 30 days, those sanctions will be lifted, allowing Deripaska to resume using the international money-moving systems and doing business as usual.
Former Defense secretary Leon Panetta was recently quoted as saying that the shutdown is hurting our national security and making us increasingly vulnerable to our enemies.
So He has dragged the American government into a shutdown, not because He wants a wall on the Mexican border, but because it damages the country– which is exactly what Putin wants.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 