ImpeachTrump – RAnt(hony)-ings

Second Impeachment

To Senators Cruz and Cornyn

You were in the capitol that day. You know what the mob did. You know who sent that mob to the capitol, looking for your blood and the blood of your fellow legislators as well as the blood of the Vice President who loyally served him for four years. The guilty person I’m referencing is Donald Trump. In 2016 he said he wouldn’t accept a vote outcome that showed that he lost, even though he planned on losing. That is the poor excuse for a human being that Donald Trump has always been. He reiterated this unwillingness to accept defeat before the 2020 election was held, after the election results were known, and still refuses to allow anyone to call him the former president within his earshot.

He lost, yet he refuses to admit the truth of this to anyone, including himself. He is an active threat to all of us individually and to you personally as a locus of power inside the American government, power that can oppose his will and the will of the mob that he controls even to this day. He and they will come for you eventually. Sooner or later there will come a time when he and they draw a line that you won’t cross, and then you will be eliminated in your turn just as every person that refuses to back his play has been betrayed over the decades that he has been in business, let alone in power as the president. This is an unavoidable course once you start down the road to dictatorship, the kind of country that Donald Trump and his supporters want to remake the United States into.

There is only one way for you to avoid this fate, avoid it for all of our sakes. You must convict Donald Trump for the many, many crimes he has committed over the last four years as well as for the ones he committed since last November when he lost his chance to be president again. Convict him and then bar him from ever holding public office again. Only then will we be free from the fear and hatred that Donald Trump wields as a weapon. We may still have to fight the White Nationalists that his behavior and your blindness in supporting him have empowered over the last four years, but at least they will not have Trump to lead them anymore.

If you don’t convict him for his crimes and bar him from ever serving in public office again, you will have loosed the hounds of war as surely as if you released them yourself. The White Nationalists will be empowered, and Trump will lead them to take control of the United States government again, just as they are taking over the state governments under the colors of the Republican party right now, while you blindly continue to pretend that it isn’t happening.

Hell is coming, Senator. On February 5th of last year, when you didn’t convict Donald Trump at his first impeachment trial, you set us up to lose half a million lives to the coronavirus under his leadership. All that blood is on your hands. The death toll will be even higher if you fail to uphold the law this time. Millions will die as the country tears itself apart from within, killed by your willingness put party over country and not remove the threat that resides within your own political party. Killed by the enemies from within the country that back this cancerous growth in your party.

May the blood of your evil deeds ever lie heavily upon you for that vote last February and for the actions that your partisan blinders keep you from taking now. Hell is coming for us all, unless you act to convict this cancer named Donald Trump and bar him from ever holding office again. If you fail us, I pray that hell will find you and yours sooner than it finds me and mine. Hell may spare me and mine if I am clever enough to avoid the scythe that death wields, but it will certainly not spare you.

Convict Donald Trump and bar him from ever holding public office again. That is the right choice, and no one knows these facts better than you do. Back the prosecutions that are mounted against him and his supporters for the crimes that they have committed. Dedicate yourself once again to the country that you took an oath to preserve, and perhaps you will be spared like Scrooge on that fateful night when he saw the error of his ways. No one knows the future. The known acts of President Trump warrant his conviction and his demonstrated willingness to subvert the rule of law requires you to bar him from ever holding office again. These things we do know. They now require you to act.

A letter I sent to our Texas Senators

Here is a video of the first day of the House managers arguments as recorded on C-Span:

C-Span – U.S. Senate Impeachment Trial – Feb 10, 2021

On January 6, President Trump left everyone in this Capitol for dead.
Joaquin Castro (Heather Cox Richardson on Facebook)

Second day of the House managers arguments as recorded on C-Span:

C-Span – U.S. Senate Impeachment Trial – Feb 11, 2021

The defenses arguments and questions as recorded on C-Span:

C-Span – U.S. Senate Impeachment Trial – Feb 12, 2021

The lunacy of the defenses arguments is only outdone by the lunacy of the votes of the 43 Republicans that effectively shut down the bid to legislatively convict Donald John Trump for crimes he had been demonstrated to have committed by the House managers, and after that to have legislatively castrated any future Trumpist moves to make the United States a monarchy run by Trumpists in the future by barring him from holding future office, on their own stated basis of insisting, in contravention of their own oaths of office, that they still didn’t believe they had the right to sit in judgement of a president who had left office, a question that had been settled in day one of the trial, left me once again bereft of hope and vision for any meaningful future for this country.

Those of the forty-three Senators that openly stated that the question of the rightness of trial was their reason for why they voted to acquit, should be censured and removed from office for their violations of their oaths to the constitution. It can’t be more simply stated than that. If they cannot be bound to their own decisions of less than a week prior, then they have no moral backbone on which they can base future judgements. They should be replaced as soon as possible with people who can stand by their own decisions, and the decisions of their own legislative bodies. Yes. I am looking at you Ted Cruz and at you John Cornyn. You have disgraced your office, your state, and yourselves. You cannot justifiably presume to represent any Texas citizen in good standing, no matter what justifications you offer for your actions.

The Bulwark Podcast – David Priess on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Impeachment – February 17th, 2021

Those were your people once, Mr. Cruz, Mr. Cornyn. The talking heads on the podcast and their audience of tens of thousands of subscribers. Now they are your opponents.

Postscript

When the Democrats took over the House again in 2019, I posted this status on Facebook:

I’m wallowing in schadenfreude. Every stormtrumper on the planet is realizing that Speaker Pelosi is two impeachments away from being President Pelosi. The indigestion they must be having right now. Priceless.
facebook

The comments that followed were more than slightly contentious. I was wrong on the substance, that I’ll admit. Who would’ve thunk it though, eh? Two impeachments. Two. Two impeachments and the Republican party let him keep the office until the very end anyway. Just out of spite.

Republicans have no soul. They sold their souls for power. I hope it was worth it.

Trump Impeachment Anniversary

A year ago today, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

In his plea to Senators to convict the president, Adam Schiff (D-CA), the lead impeachment manager for the House, warned “you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country.” Schiff asked: “How much damage can Donald Trump do between now and the next election?” and then answered his own question: “A lot. A lot of damage.” “Can you have the least bit of confidence that Donald “How much damage can Donald Trump do between now and the next election?” and then answered his own question: “A lot. A lot of damage.” “Can you have the least bit of confidence that Donald Trump will… protect our national interest over his own personal interest?” Schiff asked the senators who were about to vote on Trump’s guilt. “You know you can’t, which makes him dangerous to this country.’’
Heather Cox Richardson

A year later, a month away from Trump’s ouster from the White House after losing the election to Joe Biden, the damage that President Trump has done is all around us, impossible to ignore:

300,000 Dead Americans

GDP Shrinkage

The Senators who voted to acquit President Trump are accomplices in the murders of all of the people who died unnecessarily this year. They are accomplices in the theft and corruption that they have enabled over all of the span of the Trump administration. The most corrupt administration in the history of the United States, hands down. They are as guilty as Trump is when it comes to the destruction of the US economy, a destruction that they are now stoking in hopes of destroying any chance of Biden being able to be successful in reviving the country before 2022.

These are the kinds of people that the Republican party sends to Washington. These are the values of the party of the Moral Majority laid bare. President Trump is actively working to destroy the country, and Mitch McConnell is helping him. Who wants to bet that the slowdown in delivery of the Pfizer vaccine isn’t Caudito Trump lashing out at the American public who rejected him?

MSNBC – The Rachel Maddow Show – December 17, 2020

Rachel Maddow won’t say it, but I will. I will go so far as to suggest that this is not only possible but probable. When Trump and his Republican lackies are willing to risk the kinds of global destruction we are potentially heading for right now if the United States collapses in upon itself in an orgy of self-destruction, what it means to plan for the failure of the Biden administration, the notion that a petty narcissist would stop delivery of life-saving medication out of spite is entirely believable.

What Trumpismo and its supporters have done is prove that Adam Schiff and the Democrats who impeached President Trump a year ago undersold us on the hazard that the country could face in his hands. If only we could go back in time, what would we say to them? What could we say to the Republican base that might possibly have changed their minds?

Failure of Justice

Facebook – Stonekettle Station

The Orange Hate-Monkey has interfered in an internal justice department matter. He has directed his fixer/AG Billy Barr to reduce the sentence that his henchman Roger Stone is facing for violating the law at his direction. He is violating ethical rules and regulations in an effort to let his friend off lightly.

So just impeach Trump again. Just do it. Tomorrow do it again for the next stupid thing he does. Then again the next day. Then again the next day. Continue to repeat as necessary until his Stormtrumpers begin to understand the landslide that is waiting to crush them.

Everything that Trump does is a violation of some ethical rule or some guideline that isn’t strictly law, and every other thing he does is a violation of law that he pretends isn’t a violation. So impeach him a hundred times. A thousand times. Does it really matter how many times he is impeached, if every single thing he does should be something he is removed from office for?

Impeach him again. Just do it.

02/13/2020 (next day) – The hand-waving by the friends of the OHM’s new fixer/A.G. has begun. The host of this segment on Morning Edition spells out the timeline for the guy, and he still insists that Barr was not taking direction from the president.

Morning Edition – How Much Is Politics Influencing The Justice Department? – February 13, 2020

Occam’s razor would suggest that the guest is lying for his buddy Billy Barr who got his direction from the President right before he got involved in the case. Was given direction by a president who is too stupid to not broadcast the illegal things he does every day.

02/14/2020 – We discover today that Billy Barr is also interfering in the prosecution of Mike Flynn.

Mr. Flynn’s case was first brought by the special counsel’s office, who agreed to a plea deal on a charge of lying to investigators in exchange for his cooperation, before the Washington office took over the case when the special counsel shut down after concluding its investigation into Russia’s election interference.
Mr. Flynn’s case has been bogged down in recent months by his lawyers’ unfounded claims of prosecutorial misconduct; a judge has already rejected those accusations. Mr. Flynn then asked to withdraw his guilty plea, which he first entered in December 2017. His case has become a cause célèbre for Mr. Trump’s supporters.
On Tuesday, Mr. Barr and Mr. Rosen overruled career prosecutors’ recommendation that a judge sentence Mr. Trump’s friend Roger Stone Jr. to seven to nine years in prison after a jury found him guilty of witness intimidation and several false statements charges, in accordance with standard sentencing guidelines, and insisted on a lower recommendation.
New York Times

…but, you know, he’s not coordinating with the president in his efforts to exonerate or mitigate the punishment of his cronies.

Featured image is a screenshot of this New York Times story.

Questions & Closing

Both impeachment cases have been presented, both the prosecution and defense. Now we will find out what the mood of the senate is towards the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) and his bullshit.

C-SPAN – U.S. Senate: Impeachment Trial (Day 9) – January 29, 2020

Prayer starts at 12:00 minutes into the video. First question is read at 15:45. Two hours in (the point where I started watching live) there is little doubt what the Texas Senators think. All of the Republican questions have been rather ham-handed gotcha questions that they can’t possibly think will advance the debate on the question before the Senate. The question of whether or not the charges brought against the president deserved to be given a proper hearing.

3:30 pm. Javelins and president Trump’s support of Ukraine. If the characterization by the president’s defense is accurate, then Donald Trump can’t be said to be working in the interest of Vladimir Putin. Putin would not want the OHM to sell the Ukrainians lethal weapons. That means that OHM and his defense are either dumb enough to think there was a server that Crowdstrike sent to be hidden in Ukraine, and that this was done somehow in relation to Vice President Biden and his son hunter. They are either that dumb, or they think that their audience is dumb enough to believe that fantasy could be true, and so sell that as a diversion. The depth of idiocy/ delusion this reveals almost beggars the imagination.

The OHM either believes the QAnon conspiracy fantasy, or he likes pretending he believes it in order to cover his desire to throw mud at Joe Biden. Wow. Just wow.

6:30 pm. What we learn from people who call in to the C-SPAN line, generally, is that the supporters of Donald Trump have very little understanding of the facts in this case. This isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that the tuned away from FOX news long enough to listen to themselves talk on C-SPAN.

Clearly the talking point they’ve picked up is that the house failed to do a proper investigation. Anyone, ANYONE who is really paying attention knows that the OHM prevented a proper investigation. That is the truth about that specific point of inquiry. Every person who puts the blame on the House is either an idiot, is uninformed, or is lying. It has to be one of those three things. A minimal level of pushback by the talking head who listens and nods would reveal which one of the three mental states the callers are in. Too bad he doesn’t do that more often.

I didn’t even watch the second day of questions and answers. I meant to come back and catalog the first day of questions and answers, but by the time I had my phone working (that article is still in progress) and finished my World of Warcraft raids for the week (priorities) the Senate Republicans were too busy sucking Donald Trump’s cock (right there in public) to be able to do anything but pay attention to the job in front of them.

No witnesses. Nothing more on the subject of the most corrupt president in US history will be entertained by the Senate that is lead by his morally bankrupt Republican party. Closing arguments were heard this morning. I may or may not watch any of the continuing charade. Here, however, are the closing arguments of the House managers who have so valiantly lead the fight against the corruption embodied by the OHM.

C-SPAN – Rep. Adam Schiff Closing Argument – Feb 3, 2020

So I moved this post up to Monday, February 3rd from Thursday, January 29th. The final vote will be on Wednesday. I’ve already started writing on that article. What has happened to this country since 2016 is unacceptable. It has to stop, and we have to stop it because no one else will.

It has been 3 years, 14 days, 7 hours and 35 minutes since Donald Trump should have been removed from office.

Trump isn’t Nixon and he’s not going to be held to account by Republicans. He’s going to weasel out, as he always does. As the rich and privileged and powerful always do. You knew it. You said so, right here, on my Facebook page, in my Twitter timeline. You knew. So did I. So did we all. Of course, we foolishly let ourselves hope it would be different, sure we did. We got excited there for a minute. Maybe this time Susan Collins and Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski would actually stand up and … well, yeah, like I said, foolish.
Stonekettle Station – Stalking Horse

Caudito Trump

A Caudillo is more murderous. I’m thankful that the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) isn’t a Caudillo. He’s a tiny little wannabe Caudillo. He’s a Caudito. My apologies to Spanish speakers for murdering their language.

I only bring this up because Robert Reich says that,

A dictator is on trial in his home country. Over half the jury is in his pocket, the foreman is openly coordinating with him to make sure he goes free, and despite public outcry the foreman is refusing to conduct a fair trial.
Facebook – Robert Reich

He says dictator and makes references to Banana Republics or Third World countries in this video.

Facebook – Robert Reich

The word for strongman leader, colloquially, in the language that is spoken South of the United States border, is caudillo. I have this on the good authority of Maria Hinojosa and this episode of Latino USA. If Trump was a dictator in the fashion of third world countries, countries that used to be South of our border here in the States, then he would be a Caudillo. Since he is a little short of the mark, I will from this point onward refer to him as a Caudito. The Caudito, Mr. Orange Hate-Monkey if I want to address him formally.

I thought Trump was a dictator in waiting when he first asked to be given the job of president. I still think he is a dictator in waiting, I just don’t think his mental makeup is vicious enough for him to be able to be a Stalin or a Mao. This is a good thing.

Player.FM – Stitcher – The Economist Asks – What makes a dictator? – Jan 17th 2020

[We] enter an age of Democracy in that you must appeal to the people. You can either do so by going to the ballot box and be elected; or, if you are a dictator, you can pretend somehow that the people really, truly love you, even though they never voted for you. But this is surely the paradox of dictatorship in the twentieth century, that even dictators ultimately wish to portray themselves as democratic figures.
Frank Dikötter

That author specifically rules out Donald Trump as a dictator because the structures of the United States government have so far kept him in check. I think the professor overestimates the fondness that Stormtrumpers feel for the United States government. I think they’d happily live under a dictatorship that governed according to the rules they felt were important enough to kill over. Things like abortion, which isn’t murder, but I digress.

The former president of Mexico, Vincite Fox, thought Donald Trump was a dictator back in 2016,

Weekend Edition – A Former Mexican President Looks At Trump And Sees A ‘Dictator’ – April 10, 2016

Just like the rest of us did. However. If Donald Trump, the OHM, really had the metal it takes to be a Stalin or a Mao, he’d have cut a bloody swath across the country already with the power that the presidency controls. Luckily for us (so far) he is too incompetent to do the job he was sent to do by his Stormtrumpers. It isn’t too late for one of them to step up and be the Stalin or the Mao, and it won’t be too late for that to happen for quite some time. Not until he is safely removed from office and cannot be brought back to power by some group or other in violation of the law of the United States.

…for now he remains Caudito Trump. But for how much longer?

Robert Reich goes on to suggest that Mitch McConnell is going to orchestrate the acquittal of his Trump card. However, Mitch McConnell isn’t in charge of the Senate during an impeachment trial. Mitch McConnell is nothing more than another senator for as long as this trial lasts. What needs to happen is for someone to point out to the actual leader of the Senate during trial, Chief Justice John Roberts, that Mitch McConnell is claiming more authority than is his due. Even the Chief Justice refers to Mitch McConnell as Leader McConnell, so the chances that pointing out his error will change his behavior is slim. But Mitch McConnell isn’t leader anything during an impeachment trial. He is senator McConnell, and the word disgraced should preface even that since he should have been removed from office already for his unwillingness to do his job properly.

…Again, someone should point these facts out to the presiding officer of the court. You can write (or call) him here.

The rest of the video is informative, as far as it goes. The yield curve inverted. That was a bad thing. Tariffs are bad for trade and the OHM loves tariffs. This is also a bad thing. The economy is weakening. Also bad. If we allow Trump to continue in office, he will drive the economy into the ditch all the while blaming everyone around him for the problems that he doesn’t know how to fix because he is a caudito. A caudillo would have executed a dozen people already and blamed them. Be thankful Trump isn’t one of those.

Anyone who doubts that Trump doesn’t want to be a dictator need only look at what he said to Representative Schiff via Twitter. Trump threatens his prosecutors. That is what that Tweet was, and no lying press secretary can change the text in the OHM’s tweets. It was a threat, and it wasn’t even the first one issued against someone who didn’t act like one of his toadies does. Jokes are funny. That was not a joke. Remove the Cadito.

Lying For the President

There were no revelations in today’s (Saturday, January 25, 2020) opening of the defense of the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) at his impeachment trial. If there had been, then NPR would have covered it in this special edition of the NPR Politics podcast.

The NPR Politics Podcast – Trump Legal Team Begins Impeachment Defense – January 25, 2020

From the brief ten minutes of the C-SPAN video that I watched, it was easy to tell that Pat Cipollone had been told not to waste his time on Saturday because of the bad TV ratings by the ratings-obsessed OHM.

I expect Monday and Tuesday to be also relatively without meaning because the defense has no case to present. Let’s set aside the perfect phone call. Just say it is irrelevant. There is no defense against the Obstruction of Congress article. The letter issued by the White House is grounds for removal of the president. All. By. Itself. …and it was written by? Pat Cipollone. The lead lawyer in the OHM’s defense. Pat Cipollone should have been disbarred already.

The only thing I’m interested in, when it comes to the defense, is if the attorneys working for the president will risk being disbarred for repeating lies they were told to repeat by the president. The sixteen hour question time that follows the defenses’ presentation should be interesting. We should know pretty shortly after it starts what the mood of the Senate is at that point.

As I have said previously, if the Senate doesn’t vote remove the OHM from office, then no president will ever comply with requests from Congress again unless it is something he thinks should be done; and every single Senator, Representative or employee of the executive branch can be investigated by foreign powers and have that dirt used against them by the president without repercussion. Any one of us could be targeted by a foreign power, and our own government would not be beholden to defend us. The stakes could not be higher, and I personally resent the lying done on behalf of the OHM. It’s bad enough that he lies constantly. Don’t insult me and the truth by repeating his lies again.

It has been 3 years, 5 days, 10 hours and 25 minutes since Donald Trump should have been removed from office.

Based on a Facebook comment

January 28, 2020. Just as I figured, the OHM’s defense offered nothing new on the critically important subject of why the OHM did not comply with congressional subpoenas. He has no defense, because there is no defense.

If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.
Alan Dershowitz, arguing before the Senate, 29 January, 2020

Obstruction of Congress

Day three of the prosecution of President Donald John Trump.

C-SPAN – U.S. Senate: Impeachment Trial (Day 5) – Jan 24, 2020

Two and a half hours into that video from C-SPAN they let Lindsey Graham go on and on lying through his teeth about the rightness and wrongness of the evidence and investigations. I noticed this before on C-SPAN and PBS. They let defenders of the president talk for hours and hours as long as the cameraman thinks that what he is getting has entertainment value.

Here’s the problem. Politics is not fucking entertainment. Politics is life and death. Blood and treasure. It isn’t fucking entertainment. All I need to understand in order to discard every single thing that Lindsey Graham has to say on the subject of Donald Trump, is to look up anything the Senator said before Donald Trump took the oath of office. The only question I have for Lindsey Graham is, what does Donald Trump know about him that he’s holding over Senator Graham’s head? What, exactly, is the dirt he has? Is it better than the dirt that Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump?

This day’s evidence mostly relates to the president’s obstruction of congress. An observation I’ve made previously, that his declaration that he will not comply with demands made by congress is in itself an impeachable act. No other president in history has done this. Why don’t they ask dear Lindsey that question? See how he wiggles out of that. No other president. Not Nixon, not Clinton, not Obama. Never in the history of this country has a president refused to comply with lawful subpoenas issued by congress. Here are a few informational screenshots from the video.

In word and in deed President Trump has declared himself above the law.
Representative Jerry Nadler

(My thoughts go out to Congressman Nadler and his wife as she goes through her cancer ordeal. May she survive to live many more healthy and happy years.)

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behavior, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.
Article I of the United States Constitution

Just imagine how they would have reacted if president Obama had ordered total defiance of all subpoenas.
Representative Jerry Nadler

That really is the important question here. If the shoe were on the other foot, Obama would have been clapped in irons within a week of even attempting what president Trump has done. Even attempting it. But Trump remains defiant. Nadler continues to enumerate exactly how, down through history, access to the president’s records has been assured by previous presidents, even those under investigation by Congress (president Polk NBC.com Think article Achive.org link) the OHM forced Speaker Pelosi’s hand. She had no choice but to call Trump’s bluff when he defied lawfully executed congressional subpoenas. Now we either have a republic, or we don’t. Either Trump is removed, or he isn’t.

C-SPAN – Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) Closing Arguments in Senate Impeachment Trial – Jan 24, 2020

It has been 3 years, 4 days, 8 hours and 54 minutes since Donald Trump should have been removed from office.

The Drug Deal

Day two of the impeachment trial. I’m still watching.

C-SPAN U.S. Senate: Impeachment Trial (Day 4) – Jan 23, 2020
Facebook – PBS

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be involved to democratic open … elections. Elections of USA.
Volodymyr Zelensky (Axios)

The drug deal started before Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine. It was his election that caused the Trump administration to panic. Rudy had been working with prosecutors under the previous president of Ukraine, trying to get those prosecutors to open investigations into the Putin-created conspiracy fantasy that Ukraine had somehow worked to undermine the Trump election campaign.

The fact that Ukraine favored the election of Hillary Clinton, as did every single one of our allies (except possibly Saudi Arabia) is irrelevant. Or would be irrelevant if any other person was president other than someone like the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) Any other president would have understood that US allies were his allies, no matter their opinions on US political competitions. For the OHM, not wanting him to win the election was tantamount to betrayal on the part of every single one of our allies. But it was especially a betrayal by Ukraine. Why? Because Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine back in the Russian sphere of influence, and not part of the EU or part of NATO.

Moth Putin

RAnt(hony)-ings

Donald Trump loves Vladimir Putin. He loves all the vicious dictators who currently hold power in the world. He wants to be one of them and has been working to make the US into a banana republic that he can rule over just like all his heroes do. But there is something special about Putin and Trump. One really has to wonder what kind of dirt Putin has on Trump that makes him so terrified of the Russian President. Because the OHM’s terror is palpable.

So Trump appears to be working for Vladimir Putin and against the interests of our allies in the region, whether he is conscious of this fact or not. It was because of the Putin fabricated conspiracy fantasy that Donald Trump, through Rudy, Lev and Igor, sought to remove ambassador Yovanovitch from her post in Ukraine. You can’t have a corruption fighter in the ambassadorial residence if what you want done involves engaging in activities that are essentially corrupt.

Before Trump, oligarchs felt relatively defenseless in the face of American efforts to strip corruption from the Ukrainian judicial system. Because the Ukrainian nation depended on American support, a figure like Yovanovitch had the leverage to demand cleaner government. But the new U.S. president presented the possibility of salvation for the corrupt. Here was an American leader who operated in the style of an oligarch, who wanted to use the legal system to wound his political rivals. Trump seemed like he could be enlisted, with a properly calibrated message, to act on an oligarch’s behalf.
The Betrayal of Volodymyr Zelensky (The Atlantic)

This is probably why Bolton instructed his subordinates not to even talk to Rudy. Instructed them to take no part in his drug deal and to inform the lawyers that he wasn’t involved. It was his unwillingness to do the presidents bidding in this matter that probably lead to his leaving/being fired. We won’t know unless and until he takes the stand and testifies. The trial continues after dinner.

Meanwhile, the publicity stuntmen working for Donald Trump just can’t seem to keep quiet.

Facebook – Stonekettle Station

This is why I quit listening to him and to them. Because they lie constantly. Paying attention to what they say is a complete waste of time. Donald Trump will always be the guy who stole from all his contractors on his building contracts. Caveat Emptor, America. Just ask them the question.

Dear Republicans. What Does Trump’s Cock Taste Like?

RAnt(hony)-ings

Make them confront exactly what it is they are doing.

C-SPAN – Adam Schiff Closing Argument – Jan 23, 2020

It has been 3 years, 3 days, 10 hours and 11 minutes since Donald Trump should have been removed from office.

Justice

I’ve been studying the subject of impeachment in the United States for several years now. Any of you who take your job as a citizen of the United States seriously have also been doing this. If not, shame on you.

In the course of my education on the subject of impeachment I’ve discovered a glaring error in the arrangement of our government and it’s various competing functions. Congress has no ability to enforce its will on its own. It is beholden to the executive branch to see that its lawful orders are followed.

This error only shows up when the executive branch and the legislature are held by different factions, as has happened since the House of Representatives flipped into Democratic hands in 2018. The executive branch, for the first time in history, has refused to honor lawfully executed subpoenas and requests. Never in history has the executive refused outright to comply with requests made of it by Congress.

In the past, the house has had to create its own arm of enforcement, the few times that it was required to contest with an unlawful, intractable executive. The first presidential impeachment, that of Andrew Johnson, saw congress having to create its own jails and create its own police force to do its bidding so as to be even capable of doing the oversight work that is delegated to it in the Constitution.

The justice department should not belong to the president. This is one of the errors in government arrangement that will have to be addressed when the presidency changes. What do I mean? Congress has no enforcement arm without being able to secure compliance of the justice department. This needs to be spelled out in plain English. The Justice department SHALL enforce congressional subpoenas and all requests for information issued by congress. The Justice department will arrest and detain ANY individual that attempts to evade a lawfully executed Congressional subpoena. The Attorney General shall answer to congress and can be fired by the Congress as well as by the president.

Justice should be effectively severed from the Executive branch. Permanently.

@righthandedleftyartist (Tom Garrahan) has removed himself from Instagram and I stupidly respected his IP rights and didn’t get a screenshot of the post that was originally in this location. Sorry?

Dear Republicans. What Does Trump’s Cock Taste Like?

This should be the question that every pundit asks every Republican who won an office in the election on November 6, 2018, since every one of them swore fealty to King Trump in order to win their elections. The question should be asked every time they hold a presser. It should be asked every time they are seen in public. It should be asked in front of their wives. Their children. Their families. Everyone needs to have the blatant corruption at the heart of every Republican victory last night spelled out in the most graphic, disgusting terms possible. Trump can get away with the shit he says every day? Ask that fucking question every fucking day until they crack.

“what does Trump’s cock taste like, Mr. Senator? Mr. Representative? Mr. Secretary?”

Maybe, just maybe, they’ll fucking wake up then. But I doubt it.

In the meantime. The weasel will try to squirm out of harm’s way. Trump has already signaled that he’ll play ball with the Democrats. Nothing doing. Not unless he turns states evidence on all his Russian contacts, fires all his children, divests from all his businesses. And when I say divest I mean sell every one of his properties to the highest bidder with all proceeds going to pay off the design and construction professionals he’s screwed over the last forty years. He has to agree to replace his entire cabinet with people who will not attempt to undermine their departments. Essentially he has to agree to congressional oversight of everything in the presidential administration, and he loses control of the military. He has to rubber-stamp everything the congress sends to him and he has to tell all his supporters how much they’ll love it.

Oh, and he also will have to insist on IRS prosecutions for the entire DeVos family.

If. If he does all of that, he can stay president for two more years. No running for re-election either. Take your pension, sit down and shut up after January 20th, 2021. If he doesn’t go for all of that, the anal probes start moving in on January 20th, 2019. Or he could just quit now and take his chances. It’s all up to him now. Let’s see which way the weasel runs.

…I spoke too soon post-election. Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh scared Trump into demanding congress do his bidding instead of trying to do something that made sense, like bow to the will of the majority of US citizens. He said (paraphrasing):

Build my wall with your money since Mexico won’t pay for it!

Unsurprisingly the answer from Nancy Pelosi and her majority of the House has been no. Also unsurprisingly the art school turtle, Mitch McConnell, refused to do anything unless Trump tells him to. So Donald Trump shut the government down.

He, the president, the man charged with keeping the government running, turned the government off. This is probably the most impeachable act we’ve seen a president do, ever. Another history-breaking action from this, the most corrupt, the most fraudulent, the most ridiculous president in the history of this country.

The standoff cannot last, and Trump will not be getting money for his wall from the Democratically lead house. They know what kind of thief he is already:

Presidential Tax Returns Revisited.

If the shutdown doesn’t end in less than a month, I predict impeachment hearings will begin to be discussed seriously. The only thing standing in the way of the government reopening is the idiot sitting in the White House not doing the job he was elected to do.

The government stayed shut down from December 22, 2018 until January 25, 2019. 35 days. For more than a month, there was no United States government. Let that sink in. There was no capacity to do anything that required the federal government to operate for almost the entire month of January, 2019. The president turned the government back on at that point. The house passed some meaningless legislation so that Trump could save face, and he grudgingly allowed the United States to continue to exist, until he changes his mind again.

…and the outrage rolled on through the year of 2019. Trump’s new flunky, AG William Barr, ensured that the Mueller investigation ended. AG Barr then lied about what was in the report, and refused to re-characterize his assessment of the report even after Bobby-Three-Sticks testified before the House. Mueller said in very precise terms (paraphrasing)

If you want him punished, you (the House) have to do it.

Weirdly, people keep telling me Mueller didn’t find anything. That isn’t what I heard in his testimony. What I heard him say was he found a lot of stuff, he just couldn’t prove any of it as a prosecutor tasked with building a case against Donald J. Trump; because that guy is the president and a president has to be impeached. That is the prosecutorial remedy for bad presidents.

Finally. On December 19, 2019 Donald John Trump was impeached by the House of representatives. It was then that speaker Pelosi proved she was the canny operator that everyone says she is. She held the impeachment articles until after the Christmas holiday (Die Hard Christmas) so that the Senate would have had time to think about the job before them, and possibly get an agreement to call the witnesses that are needed to prove the case they’ve built against the President. That process is going on now, so I have moved this article forward in time to the day the House Managers began presenting the prosecution’s case in the Senate. That date (for the later clarity of this article, so I don’t have to move this fucker forward in time. Again. -ed.) is January 22, 2020.

Side note

On January 14, 2020, the new P.M. of the United Kingdom (soon to be just the Kingdom of England and Wales once again. After Brexit that is. AB? –ed.) the infamous Bojo is also on his knees sucking Donald Trump’s cock. I wonder if he has an opinion about the flavor? The BBC reports that Bojo wants to Replace Iran nuclear plan with the Trump deal. That’s rich. Like there will be a Trump deal with Iran short of full-out war. Yeah, that will happen.

I’m watching the case being put before the Senate as I write this (January 22, 2020, 6:30 pm, day three according to C-SPAN) I moved this article forward to the date of the impeachment trial in the Senate while watching the opening arguments yesterday (01/21/2020) seemingly endless arguments over the rules that the Senate would follow during the trial. I have now updated the article with links to some of the Trumpismo articles that I’ve written since the 2018 elections. It is now time to get busy watching this rare political event unfold.

C-SPAN – U.S. Senate: Impeachment Trial (Day 3) – Jan 22, 2020
Facebook – PBS News

Make no mistake here. If the Senate acquits Donald John Trump without calling witnesses, every Republican Senator who votes to acquit will have taken their turn at sucking the President’s cock. Every single one of them. This act of theirs will make them complicit with Trump’s official crimes when they finally come to light.

More importantly, every one of them should be investigated by the next president who takes control of the office, and that investigation could very well be conducted by foreign governments interested in seeking favor with the president of the United States. They should probably think pretty hard about acquitting Donald John Trump. You never know who the next person who holds an office might be. Just ask Barack Obama if he’s happy about his current predicament. Ask him if he thinks the future turned out the way he wanted.

Back in January of 2017 when I said:

Caveat Emptor

Was the phrase that we needed to understand the most in the time of Trump, this is pretty much where I saw us ending up. I didn’t know when and I didn’t know exactly how, but I knew that impeachment and ignominy were in the GOP’s and Trump’s future.

Authoritarianism vs. Humanism

The basis of the conflict in question left us no wiggle room. This is where we were heading as soon as the political system allowed Trump to hold the office of President. We were heading for the kind of crisis that this country hasn’t seen since the lead-up to and then resolution of the Civil War, no matter what the actual events that transpired in the then future were. It has been 3 years, 2 days, 13 hours and 22 minutes since Donald Trump should have been removed from office, basically the day after he was sworn in. It will have been a bit longer by the time you read this.

Postscript

I wrote the beginning segments of this article after the 2018 Democratic midterm victories while still under the delusion that we would see a change in President Trump’s behavior. Would see him modulate after the drubbing he suffered in that election. Once again, I was wrong. Against all the evidence of history, the Republicans and their president continued on their merry way pretending that they didn’t have anything to worry about.

The government shutdown also derailed my train of thought and I forgot about this article until I went back over the year’s articles trying to decide what I would use to anchor that first day of testimony that so many of us had been waiting for, for over a year. Finally that day had come. Not that it amounted to much.

Obstruction of Congress

Nor did the second impeachment make any fucking difference. Donald Trump was impeached twice, made a pandemic worse:

Coronavirus Panic

Attempted a coup:

Coup D’Etat

…and still the GOP sucks on that tiny little cock of his. None of the treasonous acts that Donald Trump has committed since the Republican party made itself the party of Trump, irrevocably welded itself to Trump and his crimes when they acquitted him that January; none of it has made any difference in the calculations of the drivers of Republican thought and the Republican party as a political entity. They still slog on in service of Trump, his corrupt businesses and their own continued unbridled desire for power.

This is why we cannot accept a Republican victory in the next set of federal elections (2022, 2024) even if it seems like they were a real result. We can’t accept it because the Republican party is a criminal enterprise attempting to take over our government and we can’t allow this to happen. I don’t know what comes after the vote that puts them back in power but I know that the US probably stops existing not too long after that point.

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They’re still kicking out perfectly good Republicans just because Caudito Trump, the Orange Hate-Monkey, doesn’t like the way they talk about him. He still thinks he’s president even though he ran away to hide at Mar-a-Lago rather than die behind the resolute desk in the same way that a respectable captain should go down with his ship. I hate to break it to him; he held the office but he never was and never will be president.

Trumpismo

The presidency is more than an office, it is a frame of mind. A frame of mind that Donald Trump simply can’t achieve. He hasn’t got the balls to do the job necessary. His daddy took them away and never gave them back.

Featured image: Esquire – Stormy Daniels’s Detailed Description of Donald Trump’s Penis Explains a Lot