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.
By all accounts, about a third of the American public supports He who must not be named. These people are mostly authoritarian personalities with a constellation of character traits that makes their thought processes mysterious and repellent to rational beings.
The best explanation I have seen of the personality traits that would tend to make people support he who must not be named is in an article in Psychology Today. (Actually it’s a blog post.) According to the author, there are five general character traits that tend to promote His support: authoritarian personality syndrome, “social dominance orientation”, prejudice (ethnic or religious), lack of intergroup contact, and “relative deprivation” (the feeling that one has been deprived of something to which they are entitled.)
This is a complex set of character traits that would be impossible to treat with psychiatric means. The only reliable way to deal with such a character would be to give them something that they feel they have been deprived of (it need not be substantial; it may be purely symbolic or even invented.)
It goes without saying that it will be necessary to deprive these people of one of their most cherished icons: He who must not be named.
The extent of the president’s delusional world view becomes greater with each passing day. Today he is a “national hero.” Recently he bestowed the National Medal of Freedom upon Miriam Adelson, whose greatest contribution to America has been her multimillion dollar contributions to the Republican Party. According to reports, she and her casino-king billionaire husband Sheldon Adelson used to be Democrats, but became Republicans as a result of their unpleasant interactions with unions for his casino employees.
It doesn’t sound as if the Adelson’s Democratic sympathies are very strong, unless the union demands in Las Vegas were intolerable. We don’t know, and are left to speculate.
Clearly, the American democratic system has been fatally infected by the influence of money– to a greater extent than it was over a hundred years ago, during the Gilded Age. Whether the capitalist system can be tamed by another Theodore Roosevelt or Franklin Delano Roosevelt is an open question.
What is not in question is the terrible destruction that has been wreaked upon the United States over the last two years. This destruction was entirely predictable– we even know who the culprits are. The thing is, we haven’t figured out a cure for a delusional, narcissistic, sociopathic, megalomaniacal commander in chief covertly supported by the Russian government. Even after we get rid of him, it will take years to repair all the damage– assuming we have the motivation and perseverance to do so.
Perhaps Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can lead us out of this nightmare forest– Bernie Sanders sure can’t do it. We can only hope that someone will take charge of the Democratic Party and reverse the decline that has beset it as a result of Republican scorched-earth policies. We must fight fire with fire and meet the lies told by Republicans with the searing truth at every turn.
While Americans were transfixed by the bizarre turmoil in the White House, American diplomats at the UN have been actively trying to stop a multilateral proposal for a comprehensive cease fire in Yemen. Instead they are pushing a pause without any humanitarian relief nor any mention of accountability for war crimes. Read more in this article in the Guardian.
It seems that Nikki Haley is leaving her post as American ambassador to the UN and no longer has anything to say. British diplomats trying to build a cease-fire proposal in the Yemeni port of Hodeidah were blindsided by an American counter-proposal after being promised American support for their efforts. The American idea for a cease-fire has all the passages calling for humanitarian aid and accountability for war crimes stripped out, just as the Saudis want it. The Americans even threatened to veto the British proposal.
This is the denouement of the Khashoggi incident– a peace offer in Yemen from the Americans, without any guarantees of humanitarian relief for twenty million starving Yemenis. There has been no acknowledgement from the White House that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia ordered the assassination and post-mortem dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen with solid establishment ties who merely criticized the prince’s leadership style without calling for any upheaval.
Mohammed bin Salman is so sensitive that he orders the killing of a man who mildly criticizes him in public (not even saying anything personal or insulting, much less advocating his overthrow.) He is so paranoid that he pursues this critic, who tries to escape his grasp by coming to America as a welcomed guest (not a bedraggled refugee.) He engineers a plot to lure the man out of the US to a Saudi embassy in another country (Turkey) so he can be killed on Saudi soil. He attempts to conceal the killing by having the body “disappeared.”
How can we associate with such a leader? Only for vast sums of cash deposited in secret to the personal accounts of family members of the president. Senators, not in on the payoff, are crying foul, to no avail. Thus we see that the government is consolidating into an autocracy that follows the whims, for the personal cash benefit, of he who must not be named. Our president doesn’t really believe in democracy.
He is betraying our democratic allies, supporting autocrats worldwide, and destroying our economy with capricious tariffs. He has shown himself impervious to reasonable persuasion by the wisest men in his political party. The only way to stop this catastrophe is to remove the autocrat. Unfortunately, the mechanisms for orderly removal of the chief of state are unequal to the emergency.
In a simpler time, 1868 to be exact, a president was impeached (and acquitted) in a month. So Americans should take heart. We don’t have to wait two more years for another president. All we need is Mueller’s smoking gun. It only took Nixon three days to resign after the Oval Office tapes were made public.
SE Cupp, a conservative CNN commentator, described He who must not be named’s presidency as “decomposing before our very eyes” and said that He is “running America into the ground.” She was speaking on her CNN show “SE Cupp Unfiltered” that runs on Saturdays. She ran through a litany of misdeeds, from Mattis’ resignation to His inability to let go of his “beautiful wall” fantasy. Her conclusion: “[he] is a terrible CEO” and a failure.
The last walk of Mattis, with his “stinging rebuke” that He was unable to read (because he can’t read) was the most significant resignation in a long week of departures. He couldn’t understand what Mattis was saying in his (for Him) too-long letter that spelled out their disagreement on Syria and Afghanistan but left his disgust and remorse unspoken.
He had to have his aides read the letter and explain it to him, in short sentences. His aides had to explain to him that Mattis was saying that he couldn’t follow His orders. He was reportedly enraged when he finally understood what the letter was saying.
Let Mattis not overshadow the resignation of Brett McGurk, who has been single-handedly holding together a coalition of over seventy countries and other entities to fight the Islamic State. Just last week, he made an important speech in which he emphasized American support for the Kurds and the Syrian Democratic forces now on the offensive against remnants of the Islamic caliphate in Syria.
He who must not be named made him look like a fool and a liar with His sudden decision to withdraw all troops from Syria within a month. He made no effort to coordinate His policy with key State Department figures who had been working behind the scenes for years to hold together a fractious group of locals who were willing to fight and die with the weapons provided by US advisors.
Withdrawing support, money, and military advisors now will mean the collapse of the Syrian Democratic front against the Islamic State and the likelihood that they will be wiped out by the Turks, who regard them as rebels.
Don’t forget the third major resignation of the last week: Ryan Zinke, head of the Department of the Interior. He leaves because the load of scandals and allegations that he has used his position for profit has become too great.
Finally, there is the departure of John Kelly, the chief of staff. He is leaving because he can’t take it anymore.
With His sudden action to name Patrick Shanahan, Deputy Secretary of Defense, as acting Secretary effective January 1 and Kelly’s previously announced effective date of the first of January, He will be alone in the White House.
There is no precedent for this flight of “stable” conservatives from an unstable “conservative” president* who insists on playing to his base while selling out the country for his own profit. We suppose that He thinks he is clever by naming Shanahan, who has business connections to Boeing (where he spent his entire career from 1986 until his appointment in July 2017), and that this will help him with the military.
It is possible, though, that with Mattis gone, He has lost the control and respect of the military. Most soldiers revere Mattis and would follow him anywhere. With Mattis no longer following His orders, He loses that automatic obedience that the Warrior Monk would command. Thoughtful soldiers may be tempted to refuse unlawful orders from their Commander in Chief.
Just now I noticed that Michael Flynn has been dinged for not disclosing that he was a paid Turkey lobbyist before he was on His team. What if this is one of Turkey’s payoffs for supporting Flynn and the president*? It certainly could be a quid pro quo for not rendering Mr. Gullen to the Turks– give them the Kurds instead. We are witnessing another betrayal of the Kurds that echoes the incidents that surrounded the end of the war to liberate Kuwait. Remember that Bush the Elder was the architect of this genocide– one of many the Kurds have suffered over the years.
It is already to late to impeach Him. The destruction of the Kurds will play out inevitably if His decision to remove our troops from Syria stands. There is only thirty days or less to go before the US military is taken from its stabilizing position between the Kurds, the Turks, and Assad. The only thing we can do is try to raise a stink that rivals the one that forced His decision to reverse His child-removal policy on our Southern border– maybe that will get Him to change His mind.
I suspected, but I have definite confirmation now. He who must not be named has a property in Istanbul in development– a forty-story hotel/business complex. Here is the official web site for this property. This is a gross conflict of interest and I cannot see how this is not a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against “emoluments”– whatever those are, I think they include multimillion dollar conflicts of interest in foreign countries!
Mattis is said to have told troops overseas recently to
“hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it.”
He’s too hawkish, especially on Iran, for Obama’s taste, but I like him. Check out this pictorial history of “Saint Mattis of Quantico” from the Business Insider web site.
(graphic image courtesy of pixabay.com)
Conrad Theodore Seitz 