Mueller – RAnt(hony)-ings

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.

facebook

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

Donald Trump Impeached. Forever.

He just got impeached. He’ll be impeached forever. No matter what the Senate does. He’s impeached forever because he violated our Constitution
Nancy Pelosi

It’s done. It’s done. The articles were delivered to the Senate today.

PBS NewsHour – Democrats formally deliver articles of impeachment to the Senate – January 16, 2019

I just watched the Senate be convened as a court to render impartial justice on the subject of the impeachment of Donald John Trump as the president of the United States. Not only has the House impeached the Orange Hate-Monkey, they have delivered that indictment to the Senate in order for it to be heard as a legal argument against the president.

What happens now is on the shoulders of Mitch McConnell and the Republican-controlled Senate. They will reconvene next Tuesday as a court to begin the deliberations of the articles of impeachment. If they fail to do justice to our country and our laws, this Senate will be judged harshly by future historians on this fact. McConnell, who has promised to walk in lock-step with the the White House on seeing the president acquitted of all charges, should think long and hard on what his history in the Senate will ultimately mean.

Will he be remembered for allowing this menace to the safety of the world, to the financial security of the United States, to continue in office? Or will he do the right thing and see him removed and barred from seeking a second term in office? Only time can tell.

What can be said, without argument, is that this action by the House is three years late in execution. Part of the blame for this is that the Senate allowed McConnell to hijack it’s authority so as to insure that the Supreme Court would be stacked with justices that he felt were loyal to his brand of conservatism. He should have been punished for his intransigence, and ejected from the Senate. But he wasn’t. Because party loyalty and the naked exercise of power mean more to today’s political actors than honesty and due diligence. This action set the stage that made getting a Republican elected in 2016 a must-do event that every Republican was determined to support. This gave us President Trump.

The other part of the blame rests on the 2016 House of Representatives lead by Paul Ryan, the one-time Republican nominee for Vice President. He should have seen that the President-elect was unsuited for his job, and made plans to have him impeached on January 21st, 2017. But again, just like McConnell, party loyalty and power kept him from doing his job even though the evidence of Trump’s incompetence was irrefutable at the time. His decision made flipping the House of Representatives into Democratic control essential to see the Presidency of Donald Trump brought to heel, if not to an end.

So here we are. January 16th, 2020. Mere weeks away from the first primary votes for the November 3rd general election, and we don’t even know if the sitting president can run for office again. We don’t know how many of his administration officers are also guilty of crimes, and thereby barred from taking his place on the ballot. And all of this harm is lying at the feet of the Republican party and it’s officers, people who allowed party to mean more than country.

How Dare You
Greta Thunberg

Featured image is from The day Donald Trump’s presidency changed forever by Chris Cillizza – December 18, 2019

Politics Takes Time.

This was my mantra through eight years of Obama. Politics takes time. It’s too bad that the average citizen doesn’t have the attention span to handle this basic fact of life. If they had the patience to wait and see what the Democrats could have done, then we wouldn’t have had 6 years of Republican control of the legislature. We wouldn’t have had a guaranteed result of no progress for Obama’s agenda, since it takes a cooperative legislature to enact the policies that the administration wants to put in place.

After stymying Obama for six years, the citizenry, appalled by the dysfunction of the US government that they created, put a known con-artist in the White House with the help of a calcified election structure that should have been revamped a hundred years ago. So we have a con-artist for president, and a congress that was elected with him from the same party, just like Obama had. What did they achieve?

Apparently nothing, because almost nothing has been done in three years, which is amazingly less than was done with Obama in charge and a congress that hated him working against him. The Trump congress did manage to give themselves and their donor base handsome tax cuts. They did manage to do that.

The Republican party is wholly corrupt. If it wasn’t wholly corrupt the Republican congressional leadership would have started an impeachment inquiry on January 20, 2017. After all, Trump is a demonstrable con-artist, tax cheat, draft dodger, etc. Because they didn’t do that, and because the citizenry did not bring life to a standstill in revolt over Trump’s blatant abuses of power, we were forced to wait until 2018 when a new congress could be seated in order to get things to change.

A little less than a year later and the impeachment inquiry has finally, officially, started. It has started now that Robert Mueller has said in no uncertain terms Congress must act to remove the President. (paraphrasing) After Trump stonewalls every attempt to investigate the abuses of power that he openly admits to engaging in. Repeatedly, proudly admits to violating the laws of the land. Laws which he announces to the world don’t apply to him. Finally we are seeing action being taken.

Finally.

Nancy Pelosi has been tasked with the job of engaging in a coup without having it look like what she is doing is staging a coup. The entire Trump administration; his cabinet officials, his Vice President, all of his political appointees and all of the judges that have been seated on his recommendation, all of those people have to be investigated and removed from office if the conditions of them getting the job they now have in some way relates to the blatant criminal behavior of one Donald J. Trump. Mike Pence is every bit as complicit in Trump’s criminal dealings as Trump and McConnell are. Every one of them will have to go before this house cleaning session is over.

Thoroughly cleaning house in this fashion will put Nancy Pelosi in the office of the president. She is the third in line for the presidency, and with the President and Vice President removed from office because of their high crimes, she becomes President. How, exactly, is someone supposed to pull that off without looking like that was your goal all along? To become president? Half of the country will say she is staging a coup no matter what she does now. I don’t know anyone who could do the job that needs to be done now that won’t be resisted just because what they are doing is overturning what half of the people who voted in the 2016 election decided.

Coup d’etat. Can it be a coup d’etat when what’s occurring is required by law? The Orange Hate-Monkey will consider losing an election a coup, which makes any objection he might offer on being forced out of office prematurely irrelevant. Stormtrumpers on the other hand are the ideological descendants of the only successful coup in United States history. The one where white supremacists overthrew duly elected governments all across the South, governments put in place by black majorities that were finally liberated by the adoption of the fourteenth amendment to the US constitution by Southern states, a condition set on their re-entry into the United States after the end of the Civil War.

In Wilmington, I found a very remarkable condition of affairs. The city might have been preparing for a siege instead of an election … All shades of political beliefs were represented: but in the presence of what they believed to be an overwhelming crisis, they brushed aside the great principles that divide parties and individuals, and stood together as one man. When I emphasize the fact, that every block in every ward was thus organized, and that the precautionary meetings were attended by ministers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, railroad officials, cotton exporters, and, indeed, by the reputable, taxpaying, substantial men of the city, the extent and significance of this armed movement can, perhaps, be realized. It was not the wild and freakish organization of irresponsible men, but the deliberate action of determined citizens … Military preparations, so extensive as to suggest assault from some foreign foe, must have had unusual inspiration and definite purpose.
The fiat had gone forth; and it was expected that the Negroes, when they learned that the right of suffrage was to be denied them, would resist. From their churches and from their lodges had come reports of incendiary speeches, of impassioned appeals to the blacks to use the bullet that had no respect for color, and the kerosene and torch that would play havoc with the white man’s cotton in bale and ware house. It was this fear of the Negro uprising in defence of his electorate — of a forcible and revengeful retaliation — that offered an ostensible ground for the general display of arms; but if the truth be told, the reason thus offered was little more than a fortunate excuse. The whites had determined to regain their supremacy; and the wholesale armament was intended to convey to the blacks an earnest of this decision. There would have been rapid-fire guns and Winchester rifles if every church had held a silent pulpit, and every lodge-room where the Negroes met had been empty. White supremacy, therefore, was the magnet that attracted, the tie that bound, the one overwhelming force that dominated everything.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

White supremacists took up arms and forced the poor people and the black people and other minorities back under their heels, at the point of a gun. White supremacists, what the press these days calls the alt-right or white nationalist, or what I refer to as stormtrumpers. They have enforced their will with violence, again and again, all while pointing to their victims as the instigators of the violence. “If you only did what I told you to do, I wouldn’t have to be hanging you right now.” Those people support Trump today. Will we let them win, again?

One thing is certain. Trump cannot be allowed to stand for election. Even allowing him to stand would be to concede that the laws do not apply to him and through him the presidency. If he is allowed to stand and even if he is defeated at the ballot box, the next president will go even farther than he has because there are no limits on what a president can or can’t do, unless we punish Trump to the fullest extent of the law. Impeach him, remove him from office, convict him of his crimes, convict his children of their crimes, seize the entirety of their wealth and distribute that wealth among his victims as restitution. Unless we make an example of Trump, the next president will point to Trump and say he got away with it, why can’t I?

I don’t see that happening. Do you?

Maybe it will happen. I don’t know. What I do know is that the United States that existed before Trump is dead. I mourn its loss, but it is well and truly gone now. What comes after Trump will be something that we have to make for ourselves. Here’s hoping that we are up to the task.

And if that better future means the politicians who demanded our trust, our support, our future are unable or unwilling to choose that better path, unwilling to risk their own safety or their careers or their political party, to save that future, then to hell with them.
Stonekettle Station

Wildly expanded from text typed and discarded and typed again as a comment to that Stonekettle Station post.

Mueller Time

Facebook – Stonekettle Station

The Democrats are connecting the dots for the far too stupid American public. Ploddingly stupid. The Republicans are still crying about “Why was there an investigation?” and “Why didn’t you pursue Hillary?” Also, they are sticking pins in the balloons holding other ongoing matters aloft. If any of the sitting Republicans on that committee are returned to office (at least the ones I’ve heard so far) then their constituents are even dumber than the average American.

Devin Nunes, Trump’s personal congressional lapdog, appears to be obsessed with Fusion GPS. It is regrettable that no one took the time to refute the oft-repeated lie that Fusion GPS started it’s opposition research under Hillary Clinton, the Stormtrumpers favorite whipping boy. As the quote below illustrates, the Clinton campaign did not initiate the research that the Republicans want to pin on her,

In September 2015, Fusion GPS was hired by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative political website, to do opposition research on Trump and other Republican presidential candidates. In spring 2016 when Trump had emerged as the probable Republican candidate, the Free Beacon stopped funding investigation into Trump.^[28] From April 2016 through October 2016, the law firm Perkins Coie, on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, retained Fusion GPS to continue opposition research on Trump.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nor is the Steele dossier the basis for opening investigations into the Trump campaign, again, an oft-repeated lie by all the Republican members of the two committees who interrogated Mueller.

Mueller can stick to the script as far as I’m concerned. What he discovered was enough to have Donald Trump impeached. That is clearly what he was hinting at while he was on the witness stand.

December 22, 2019. It is now clear to me that most people had no idea what Mueller found out, even six months later. It is almost as if their brains can’t retain facts in the face of so much repeated bullshit.

Mueller says: ImpeachTrump

The order appointing me special counsel authorized us to investigate actions that could obstruct the investigation. We conducted that investigation, and we kept the office of the acting attorney general apprised of the progress of our work. And as set forth in the report, after that investigation, if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.
Robert Mueller via the New York Times

Robert S. Mueller III, his first public comments about the Russia investigation. – Doug Mills/The New York Times

This was a not too subtle hint to the US Congress that the next action that needs to be taken is by them. Like it or not, they have to impeach Donald Trump or they will be abandoning the framework that this country was founded upon. It is one way or the other, and there is no way in between.

Trump is a criminal, many times over. This was true even before he became the president, as documented over and over on this blog, referencing dozens of news outlets. Now he has committed other crimes that Bobby three sticks cannot charge him for. Congress must take up this task, or admit that they have no power to curb a modern president. If they admit this, they admit that they are no longer a co-equal branch of government.

The full Mueller report is here. #ImpeachTrump

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

The charge of high crimes and misdemeanors covers allegations of misconduct by officials, such as perjury of oath, abuse of authority, bribery, intimidation, misuse of assets, failure to supervise, dereliction of duty, unbecoming conduct, refusal to obey a lawful order, chronic intoxication, and tax evasion. Offenses by officials also include ordinary crimes, but perhaps with different standards of proof and punishment than for nonofficials, on the grounds that more is expected of officials by their oaths of office.
An example of a bad Wikipedia page.

The above came up in a Google search as an example of what the phrase High Crimes and Misdemeanors means, and it is a pretty common example of the kind of confusion that I see among the non-legally educated public. I’ve heard this dozens of times from a myriad of places; and the confusion over this phrase, like the confusion over the purpose of the Electoral College, is about to drive me nuts unless I take the time to explain it at least once.

If you were to speak to lawyers about the meanings of these terms, you would get a completely different answer than you would get out of the general public or from the mass media or social media. Specifically, High Crimes and Misdemeanors is a phrase in the U.S. Constitution. It is a term of art, not a type of crime that we must define through some mystic process in order for it to be understood. The definitions already exist.

A misdemeanor is a known quantity defined by law, just like a felony is defined by law.

Felonies and misdemeanors are two classifications of crimes used in most states, with petty offenses (infractions) being the third. Misdemeanors are punishable by substantial fines and sometimes jail time, usually less than one year. Felonies are the most serious type of crime and are often classified by degrees, with a first degree felony being the most serious. They include terrorism, treason, arson, murder, rape, robbery, burglary, and kidnapping, among others.
Findlaw – Classifications of Crimes

There are many possible misdemeanors that could be charged against the sitting president, if a president could be indicted in the fashion that a normal citizen could be charged. I would go so far as to argue that this president should be charged as if he was a normal citizen considering that he is well beneath the quality of human being that I would define as normal, but the niceties of tradition and political maneuvering hamstring most of the arguments that would allow for the direct prosecution of a sitting president for provable crimes in your average courtroom in Washington D.C. or elsewhere.

Lacking the ability to bring charges against a sitting president directly, we have, by definition, to be able to remove a president without having to meet the high standards that a criminal prosecution would require; in other words, the bar for impeachment of a official is lower than the bar for convicting an average citizen. This is because the standards of behavior are higher for political officeholders than the standards of behavior for your average fry cook.

That is why the term high crimes is used in the U.S. Constitution rather than the legal term felony.

high crime : a crime of infamous nature contrary to public morality but not technically constituting a felony
specifically : an offense that the U.S. Senate deems to constitute an adequate ground for removal of the president, vice president, or any civil officer as a person unfit to hold public office and deserving of impeachment
Webster’s Legal Definition of High Crime

It is worth noting (h/t to Chris Hayes) that treason and bribery are listed crimes which can be brought against a sitting president for the purposes of impeachment, and that both treason and bribery can be proven from the behavior of Donald Trump without even breaking a sweat trying. This is above and beyond the phrase high crimes and misdemeanors which covers everything a president might do that was beneath treason and bribery but still not things a president should do.

…and that is why I have maintained that Donald Trump was a fool to even try to run for the office of the president for three years running. This is still my opinion, and the evidence for this opinion has only increased over his time in office. Impeachment is a pro forma operation when it comes to Trump, inc. His crimes are known. I, a layman, have detailed his crimes across the hundred-odd posts on this blog that I’ve written about this subject, and there are many more crimes that I’m sure I’ve missed in the last three years of the non-stop Trump media orgy we’ve all lived through. As to the specific criminal charges relating to the 2016 election that could be brought against him, those are icing on the cake. They aren’t needed, although everyone seems to think they are what will determine the future of the Trump presidency.

They won’t, because they aren’t the crimes that can be proven here and now. The Mueller report documents the crimes of obstruction that could be brought against Donald Trump, but he rightly or wrongly refused to bring those charges against him. In any case, the job of accusing and then convicting a sitting president and removing him from office falls to the Senate once articles of impeachment are passed by the House of Representatives. The crimes that can be proven right here and now without a protracted redaction fight in the courts are the financial crimes documented by his corporate accountants, and these crimes are a subpoena away from being proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.
Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #65

People who expect Trump to last another two years should probably hang onto their seats (yes, I’m looking at you) because it is liable to get really messy over the next 18 months. No one can tell you what will happen, because nothing like this has ever occurred in the history of the United States. We are in the moment of crisis when Rome became an empire and was no longer a Republic. We are in the twilight era when the USSR was ceasing to function, but continued to grind on for a decade and more through sheer inertia.

The impeachments should not be limited to Trump, either. The Attorney General, the Treasury Secretary, even the Vice President are all open targets based solely on their behavior within the Trump administration. The emoluments clause remains the albatross hanging around all of their necks, collectively. They have all conspired to allow Donald Trump to profit from the office of the president, allowed him to steal funds directly from all of us to further his own fortunes. This cannot be tolerated.

The Trump administration will end a longstanding requirement that certain nonprofit organizations disclose the names of large donors to the Internal Revenue Service, a move that will allow some political groups to shield their sources of funding from government scrutiny.
New York Times

We The People not only expect but demand that we be told who buys whom and at what price, no matter how much power that person or group believes they have. This will be true for as long as as bribery, private financing for campaigns, is allowed. Mnuchin answers directly to Trump. He should be indicted along with Trump and the rest of his administration for high crimes and misdemeanors. This is no longer a request. #ImpeachTrump or join him on the dock to be charged with him. Pick one.

If you are afraid of where the truth might take you, if your loyalty is to a would be king and not the nation, then you are complicit. If you’re outraged at my words instead of at the thought of what that process might find, if you don’t want to know the truth, well, then you’re the problem.
Stonekettle Station

Google Delivers Russian Propaganda

I’ve got some feedback for Google

I don’t usually use Google now. I don’t know how many people even know what that is. If your phone is an android phone, you should be able to swipe right on the home screen to get to Google now. Google now isn’t even what it is called anymore, but it still is exactly what Google now used to be, it’s just referred to as Google these days. That makes the following feedback even more succinct.

The screencapped story above was at the top of my Google feed today. A prime example of why I don’t use Google now very often in the first place. Top stories on my feed are almost always some flame-inducing bullshit from some less than trustworthy source. What does Google think I should read first today? A story from rt.com on Rachel Maddow. Google is suggesting I read an RT story about Maddow when there is a perfectly decent news article over on the Washington Post website that actually tells me what the real facts in question are. A news piece that isn’t about Rachel Maddow in the first place. So Google? Are you officially acting as a propaganda arm for the Russian government now? Why would I be offered a news story from rt.com in the first place, if not? RT is not a legitimate source for anything newsworthy. They are an even less reliable source than FOX is, which is saying quite a bit.

YouTube’s recommendation algorithms are designed to steer viewers to videos they may not have otherwise searched for, including by automatically playing more videos through its “Up next” function. But experts said that functionality can lead viewers down a rabbit hole of increasingly concerning videos of conspiracy theories, disinformation or offensive content.
YouTube’s algorithms have previously been designed to maximize watch time, which Chaslot and others have criticized as rewarding more shocking or sensational videos. YouTube said it now relies on information such as user surveys, likes, dislikes and shares to improve its recommendations.
Even its efforts to combat misinformation have in some cases backfired, as happened this month when videos of the flaming collapse of the spire of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris were incorrectly identified by YouTube as imagery from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York.
Washington Post

Here’s a thought, Google. A thought I’ve offered to you as design advice more than once. I want the ability to exclude URL’s directly as an input function. I want to be able to key in URL’s directly and exclude those URL’s from my news feed. This would be useful in two ways. One, it would stop your customers from flaming you every time you offered an article that the user felt did not adequately outline the facts in question. Secondly, this block information should be useful as a rule of thumb determinate for the reliablilty and general acceptability of the source among the general public. A general trustworthiness rating of a site.

The subject in question is an excellent example of the problem. If I want to know how to get to the meaning of the Mueller report, I have plenty of reliable sources that I could go to, none of them controlled by the Russian government. Here’s one.

Thursday I surveyed the entire Mueller report. I read some sections carefully; I skimmed others. My job was to anchor Lawfare’s initial coverage, so I needed to have a sense of the big picture, as well as detailed knowledge of certain findings and arguments. Starting Friday, however, I am reading the entire document carefully, starting at the beginning. I’m writing up my thoughts as I go in this post. There will be no cohesive argument to this journal. It will simply be a collection of my observations, questions and thoughts as I go through the document. It will get long. I will not attempt to summarize the underlying document, merely to reflect on it, but I will organize this post by document section. I will update the post as I read. I hope people find it useful.
Lawfare Blog – Notes on the Mueller Report: A Reading Diary

Lawfare is world’s above in reliability for communicating legal information than any other site I that I can think off right off the top of my head. So, contrary to the talking head on the RT Youtube video that dismisses the entirety of the report as some kind of conspiracy against the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) you might discover that the Mueller team uncovered real crimes committed by the sitting president of the United States, and we might want to impeach him for these crimes. It would probably be a good idea.

It would probably also be a good idea not to act as the propaganda arm of any government, Google. The numbers of propaganda organs that survive unscathed after the existing powers are unseated is a number very close to zero. You might want to contemplate your future employment plans if you continue down this road. The vast majority of the American people are not fooled by this chicanery conducted by the OHM and his Russian buddies. There will be hell to pay, eventually.

Google is not the only culprit here, either. Google is simply the culprit pushing misinformation on my personal device. In this TED talk, listen while this journalist describes the multiple crimes and misinformation spread by the leave campaign, with direct ties to Donald Trump and Russia.

Carole Cadwalladr – TED2019 – Facebook’s role in Brexit — and the threat to democracy

This is the real harm in allowing ourselves to be used in this fashion. Allowing ourselves to be pushed in a direction we really don’t want to go except for the lies being told to us. The referendum that Theresa May thinks she has to honor was conducted outside the law. It baffles me why she thinks doing the stupid thing the referendum calls for, leaving the EU, is the thing that has to be done. What has to be done is to punish the lawbreakers who enacted the sham on UK citizens. The felonious results of the sham are irrelevant.

Misogyny by Any Other Name

Let’s imagine if 80,000 votes in the Rust Belt had gone the other way in 2016 and Hillary Clinton were president. Let’s also imagine there were controversial circumstances surrounding her victory – a foreign adversary attacked our political system in the hopes of putting her in power – and reasons to believe the Democratic campaign may have cooperated in some way with the attackers.

…Would there be widespread hand-wringing about those who dared to question Clinton’s earlier denials of wrongdoing? Would congressional Democrats call for Republicans’ resignations and demand new investigations into federal law enforcement?
Imagine if the Mueller report scrutinized Clinton instead of Trump

Hillary Clinton has been the prime target of hatred for women for most of my life. If you had a problem with women in general it was Hillary Clinton that was cited as evidence of this problem. From the moment she stepped upon the national stage and presented herself and her husband as two sides of the same coin, she has been the target of ire for females by both males and females alike. I should have remembered this fact before thinking that she could ever be president, but my desire to not see the United States descend into the hellhole it is now on the path to becoming blinded me to that painful truth. The painful truth that is still reiterated in every chant of #lockherup, in the constant conservative and #MAGA refrain of What about Hillary? in the face of any criticism of their lord and savior, Donald Trump.

I have a pretty clear memory of the first time she strutted onto my radar, back in the early days of Bill Clinton’s first term in office. It was during the rollout of what conservatives derogatively called Hillarycare. I bought the lie back then, not understanding just how skewed the information that I was consuming was. How conservative everywhere in Texas is, even in the bluest of blue parts of Texas. Women had a place and Hillary Clinton wasn’t conforming to what was expected of women, behaviorally, back in the eighties.

Throughline – The Woman Question – October 20, 2022

I don’t want to put her on a pedestal. There are things she did that were objectively wrong. That isn’t the point of this article. The point is that if you pretend that everything she did was done by a man, you wouldn’t even have batted an eye at her behavior. This is probably the most telling argument against her as a leader, that she was and is absolutely ordinary from a human perspective. She compromised her values to protect her husband, just like anyone else would do. She waited to discover what the polls would tell her before taking a stand on a subject, just like every other career politician does. There is not one thing that she is castigated for that men have not done and been forgiven for. It is because she is a woman that people hate her.

That is what misogyny means.

Bad news for the haters: History is decidedly unafraid of “the woman card.” It doesn’t care how many people will stand on tables today and swear they’d feel the same if she were a man. It will see us for what we are—a sick society, driven by misogyny and pathetically struggling to come to terms with the fact that women do not exist solely to nurture.
Huffingtonpost – Larry Womack – Stop Pretending

Hillary Clinton was nowhere near as unpopular as her haters think, as pundits are now saying retroactively. Rather, what was underestimated was the misogynistic influence. What do I mean by that? I mean the people who blamed her for her husband’s presidency, or credited her with the same. She isn’t Bill Clinton and all the baggage that name and presidency entails.
Whether she had covered for him or castigated him would have made no difference, and the failure to separate her from her husband’s behavior is the clearest form of misogyny that I can point to. But it’s hardly the only example.

Hidden Brain – Too Sweet, Or Too Shrill? The Double Bind For Women – October 18, 2016

When the person was presented as a high powered person, who was very ambitious, we found that the person was seen as much more unlikable when it was a woman than when it was a man
Madeline Heilman

Ashley Judd – TEDWomen 2016 – How online abuse of women has spiraled out of control

But let’s forget about the hatred leveled at powerful women. Women of status in the US today. Let’s go to the other end of the social spectrum. From the wealthy and powerful and the unjustified treatment they suffer, to the women with nothing. Let’s look at what happens to the victims of war. American women who were radicalized and joined the Islamic State in Syria.

American-Born ISIS Bride – MSNBC – Feb 22, 2019

Read through the comments under that video. The calls to refuse these women re-entry to the United States, even though they have no other nationality to claim. We cannot make them stateless by revoking their citizenship, and we cannot keep them from returning if they are citizens. If we violate international law in this case, we will have no grounds to hold other countries to international law later. To keep these people from being radicalized again, we HAVE TO make sure they are fully engaged in society for the foreseeable future.

I don’t know the particulars of each case. It’s entirely possible that they deserve prison time for their actions in Syria. That isn’t the question here. The particular woman who was interviewed for the television segment expects to get a prison sentence. However, Donald Trump has revoked her passport. He has rendered her stateless. He has violated international law, at the same time as he is harassing other countries to abide by international law.

The Daily – The American Women Who Joined ISIS – Feb. 22, 2019

Hold on, I hear you saying. We can’t just let these people come back here. That’s the catch. We already have. American men who have surrendered under similar circumstances have been repatriated. The women, though? We don’t want those women back. That’ll teach the rest of the women to stay in line. Never mind that we cannot legally denaturalize a citizen. Only the court can do that, and we have to bring them back here to put them on trial. It’s a catch-22. We can’t keep her out, and we can’t say she doesn’t belong here without first bringing her home. All of them have to come home, but the women most of all. Most of all, because singling them out for different treatment is a hallmark of misogyny.

Reshma Saujani – TED2016 – Teach girls bravery, not perfection

I want to live in a world where women are encouraged to fight back. In that world men will treat women better. But instead of teaching them to fight back we train girls to be passive. To smile meaninglessly. To never let a moment of anger show. Passivity gets you beaten to death while you sit and take it, and the women who do fight back are punished, punished more harshly than we punish men.

The Ezra Klein Show – This Conversation Will Change How You Understand Misogyny – Kate Manne

Think of the strongest, surest woman you know, and then think about what is said about her. Now think about that person as a man. See the problem now? I’m familiar with the argument. I’ve been around the park a few times now. A life without conflict is not really living, is expecting too much from others. Standing on “no conflict” as an achievable goal ignores the natural world around us where conflict is everywhere.

Caroline Paul – TEDWomen 2016 – To raise brave girls, encourage adventure

The misunderstanding originated with the separation of physical violence from verbal violence. Passivity starts with being afraid to speak your mind, not with the refusal to come to blows. Passivity is present in hiding in the “safe room” rather than fleeing from the aggressor or fighting back if necessary. Of being prepared to gut that bastard the next time he comes near, rather than forgive him. You can forgive his corpse, sweetheart. Forgive it all you like. Make sure it is a corpse first.

What? Too harsh? You’ve never seen your mother beaten. Never been beaten yourself. You’ve never discovered that rage within yourself and wondered where it came from. Walk a mile in my shoes. In a partner I wanted someone that would have my back because she wanted to protect me as much as I wanted to protect her. I taught my daughter to defend herself, that it was okay to defend herself. If women are our equals, they don’t need our permission to be in our faces all the time. They simply will be, and we (the men) will just have to take it. Hopefully we’ll manage as well as the women have.

Sarah Kay – TED2011 – If I should have a daughter

Postscript

I’ve been sitting on this one for quite a while. What we did to Hillary Clinton was misogyny and she’s not the only victim of our misogyny. Apologize to your daughters and your wives. Thank them for not gutting your heartless ass. That they haven’t thought about doing this is possibly because they are also misogynists. It is also possible that women don’t contemplate life in that way. You should also be thankful for that fact, if it is one.

#IBelieveHer and That Still Isn’t Enough People

An Article of Impeachment Against Donald J. Trump

When the framers were debating impeachment at the Constitutional Convention, George Mason asked: “Shall any man be above justice?”
The same question faces us now: Can a president use the power of his office to hold himself above the law? Trump is unlikely to face impeachment anytime soon, or perhaps anytime at all. But it’s time for all of us — voters, members of Congress, Trump’s own staff — to be honest about what he’s done. He has obstructed justice.
He may not be finished doing so, either.
New York Times Opinion By David Leonhardt Jan. 28, 2018

This was in my Facebook memories for today. On this day, one year ago, you posted this link from your Tumblr account. A dead link to my now deleted Tumblr account. As I was reading over the list of charges in the article I realized the list is longer than 10 points now, a full year later. Some of these points have been enumerated on this blog over the last two years. This article is the latest in a series of articles that carry the tag #ImpeachTrump but even that list of articles is hardly exhaustive or even current. I’ve grown tired over the past two years. Tired of attempting to categorize the many, many impeachable offenses of the sitting president. But the offenses continue unabated, whether I’m paying attention or not.

The appointment of Matthew Whitaker to the job of Attorney General after firing Jeff Sessions would figure highly in the expanded list of charges. Appointing someone who was not Senate approved to the job of Attorney General is itself an extra-constitutional act, let alone naming someone who explicitly applied for the job by stating he would end the Mueller investigation.

…and yet Matthew Whitaker hasn’t done the one thing he was sent to do. Have you seen the video of the guy sweating in front of television cameras? That is the look of a man with his balls in a vice. Caudillo Trump gave him a job to do, and then Bobby three sticks explained to the idiot what would happen to him if he did the job that His Excellency sent him to do. Now Matthew Whitaker’s balls are in a vice. He can’t do what he was appointed to do and he can’t answer questions about the thing that he was sent to end because Mueller will throw him to the wolves along with Trump if he does. Clearly, Matthew Whitaker can’t wait to be out of the hot seat so that he can let the next guy take over.

Which brings me to the next point on the list of impeachable acts. The nominee for the Attorney General’s job currently being reviewed by the Senate. He too applied for the job by stating he would end the Mueller investigation. If he gets the nod from the Senate (and why hasn’t he already gotten that?) Bobby three sticks will explain to him, in pretty much the same detail he explained to Whitaker, exactly what will happen to him if he interferes with the investigation of Caudillo Trump. In short order he will be seen sweating in front of the cameras refusing to answer questions about the Mueller investigation, while it continues unimpeded.

Caudillo Trump just can’t seem to figure out that he’s digging his own grave with each thing he does to attempt to hinder the investigation. Each act, another example of his willingness to subvert justice. Why would an innocent man feel the need to keep trying to subvert justice in this way? Could it be he is as guilty as I argued he was two years ago? Caveat Emptor?

The Democratic party now runs the U.S. House of Representatives. Speaker Pelosi holds the gavel, and articles of impeachment would pass the house if they were proposed and seconded, and the trial were to be held today. But the Senate is still held by Republicans, and we need two-thirds of the Senate to convict the current occupant of the Office of the President and remove him from the office that he has repeatedly demonstrated he is not fit to hold. That number is sixty-six. Sixty-six Senators to vote to convict, and only 49 firm votes are currently available for that conviction. We need seventeen Republicans that want to get re-elected next year to step forward and call for the removal of Caudillo Trump. Who will those brave souls be?

First they’ll have to oust McConnell as leader of the Republicans in the Senate. I wish them luck in that endeavor. We could take that hard road, or we could hold out a little longer and then cheer President Pelosi as she accepts the nomination of the Democratic party for the office of President of the United States in 2020, an office she inherited due to the crimes committed by the previous president and his vice president. And then cheer her election that November, and her swearing in the following January. Pick one.

Editor’s note. William Barr became A.G. Barr, making the entire Republican caucus of the Senate complicit in Donald Trump’s crimes since they voted to approve A.G. Barr’s appointment to the Justice Department, where he promptly set about sabotaging everything that the Justice Department was doing that was impeding Trump’s unconstitutional agenda. Mueller Time was a bit of a dud when it occurred because of A.G. Barr’s lies concerning the findings of Robert Mueller, lies that Mueller did not explicitly call out during his testimony before congress.

William Barr should be under investigation now, just as his boss is currently under investigation for impeachment. There are hundreds of public servants appointed by Trump and approved by the Republican Senate that should similarly be under investigation, given what is now known about Trump’s reckless corruption schemes.

Third Parties Are Wasted Effort

Dedicated to Another Anonymous Internet Troll

That isn’t what happened. What the meme image says? That isn’t what happened. Oh, I know the media casts things a particular way. They say cheated when what they can prove is conscious manipulation of existing rules to favor the Democrat within the Democratic party.

The troll who posted this image, both of the trolls that posted this image, have their sources that say Hillary Clinton cheated. They aren’t even propagandist sources; at least, as far as having a specific political agenda to advance goes they aren’t propagandizing. It’s just that democracy is a thing that is as elusive as freedom is when it comes to definitions.

You can’t rely on Wikileaks to deliver unbiased, unvarnished truth any more than you can rely on an author flogging her latest book to be completely forthright when it comes to her own complicity in seeing the biggest fundraiser for the Democratic party received the nomination of the Democratic party. This is why the accusation of cheating doesn’t stick. It doesn’t stick because the private entity that is the Democratic party isn’t beholden to advance candidates that are popular with people who aren’t Democrats. Democratic money, Democratic supporters, Democratic choice. This is party politics 101.

I’ve been working on a post for ages that I had titled Why Libertarians Lose. I can’t make the damned article gel out into a set of arguments and ideas that looked like a consistent narrative. An article that didn’t read as petty and vindictive. I can sum up the long, long argument that I’ve made over the years with a single sentence. There is no reason why libertarians lose aside from the fact that they insanely know the reasons they lose, and then they repeat the behavior that made them lose each and every election previously. The reason the article reads as petty and vindictive can also be summed up with a single sentence. Every other independent and every other third party in existence fails in the exact same way.

They all, independently and in all their third party forms, fall into the same trap. What trap, you ask? The trap of not understanding what politics is. Politics, by definition, discounts individual actors. Your beliefs, your feelings, your desires, are irrelevant to political machinations. This is true of every group effort everywhere. Politics is group effort. Working as a group. Achieving a goal, as a group. How do you achieve goals as a group? Compromise. Compromise is the name of the game and those unwilling to compromise are what makes governing impossible without resorting to the use of force.

Force is the jaw of the trap swinging shut. Force will be brought to bear if compromise remains an impossibility. This is a truism, a fact of human existence that anarchists and individualists everywhere need to understand. Unwillingness to compromise on ideological grounds requires force as a response in order to achieve any given goal. You may be right to say you own all the water in a particular area. You may be able to prove this in court. It will not make you any less dead when the people around you who are dying for want of your water kill you for it.

In this system if you don’t vote blue you had best be prepared to be ruled by red. Because that’s where we are headed in the long run. The ground has been staked out. The forces have been drawn up. Democracy on the one side, and authoritarianism on the other side. The Democrats, through sheer force of will on the part of the populace, have been wrenched into the position of supporting democracy. The Republicans represent the feudalist forces of corporate dominance and central authoritarian rule, as I outlined in:

Authoritarianism vs. Humanism

The Berners or Bernie Bros as they were labeled by some of the press are still intent on Berning it all down. That is an article I wrote during the election, detailing why these accusations of cheating leveled at Clinton and the DNC are fake. The accusation is simply more of the type of authoritarian bullshit that we’re getting now from the Tea Party neh Republicans. One guy can’t fix the United States by himself, and Bernie Sanders and his candidates still aren’t winning Democratic races. They aren’t winning because Democrats aren’t voting for them, and you can’t make people vote the way you want.

You have to alter the underlying system of primaries and party structure, and that means joining one of the two parties encoded into the system. I spent more than a decade in third party hinterlands. That pursuit is a fool’s errand. Good luck with that.

facebook/RBReich, YouTube

The video is a little over-simplistic in it’s solutions even if it is correct in the thrust of the message that voting third party, voting your ideology, delivers the majority to the worst possible candidates (never argue with math) Texas and other states that allow parties to hold independent primaries or caucuses defeat the leavening that is provided by ranked choice voting.

Jungle primaries should be the norm. The process of winnowing off the lessor candidates in favor of the top two vote getters ensures that the general election will be focused on candidates and issues that the majority thinks is important.

Redistricting commissions should also be the norm. Representatives should not be drawing districts that keep them in office. The opposite should be true, the people should be approving maps that ensure a broad spectrum of the voting population is equally represented in congressional districts.

facebook, facebook

Here’s another article from earlier in 2016:

US Politics Fix – Starting the Process

Pay attention to the graphic, the one where Austin is split into 5 different districts. How do you fix that? You fix it by participating in the democratic process and then voting for Democrats because Republicans currently run the state of Texas at all levels above county court. It will either be Democrats or Republicans that run the Texas state government because that is how the system in Texas is set up. It is even worse in several other states. Voting third party is no better than not voting at all; possibly worse than not voting. At least the people who aren’t voting aren’t completely wasting their time.

The Democratic party didn’t cheat Bernie out of the nomination because the Democratic party sets its own standards for who can lead it, and Bernie Sanders did not meet those standards. The Democrats set standards in much the same way that Republicans failed to set standards and so got a demagogue elected to the White House. This is the exact failure of faction that Madison opined about. The failure of faction playing out in front of our faces But that doesn’t alter the system that has to be maintained through the parties in the meantime. Someone has to and will do that work. I would prefer to actively participate in the reordering of American society rather than light the match that burns it all to the ground. That is the difference between me and the people supporting Bernie Sanders. The people supporting Donald Trump. I like the dream that the founders envisioned and tried to capture. Failed to capture. Always we strive to be a more perfect union, and we fail frequently. But we pick ourselves back up and try again. That is what being an American is all about.

Saying that the Democrats cannot win Texas, cannot do the job in front of them nationally, is to engage in the waste of time known as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. Vote blue or be ruled by red. Stop serving the factions (including Greens and Libertarians) start serving the long-term good of the country. Vote Democrats like Joe Manchin out of office. Do it at the primary level. His vote for Kavanaugh proves what he is as a person. He’s willing to bend a knee before unearned authority. We don’t need his kind anywhere but behind bars.

The Bernie Bros lost because they (Bernie Sanders and his supporters) did not want to play the game the way the Democrats played it. The way The Clintons have played it since ascending to power in 1992. They played the system they knew, and they won. The Clintons won only to lose to Hillary’s high negative numbers, the highest negatives for any presidential candidate in history except for one. Donald Trump, the most hated president ever to be elected to office. Hated before he had done a single thing in office.

Trump played the Republican game exactly the way the Republicans set it up, and won. He’s president, in spite of the fact that the Clintons got three million more votes, and in spite of the fact that his negative numbers were higher than her negative numbers. This little set of facts proves out the game theory hypothesis concerning the worst candidates winning in straight plurality voting, but it proves absolutely nothing about law, or fairness, or cheating.

Cheating is getting the FBI to question your morality a week before the election. Cheating is getting in bed with foreign dictators (the same foreign dictators that Wikileaks is in bed with) and using their assets to hack your opponents campaign. Cheating is what Trump will finally be brought to trial for, if only the House flips and the Senate changes hands sufficiently that the writing will be on the wall for the surviving portions of GOP power. If congress flips and the Democrats follow through on promises made (and why wouldn’t they? They will after all have to answer to voters just as the Republicans do) there will be proof of cheating in the form of criminal convictions. There are already criminal convictions and Mueller is just getting warmed up.

I have news for anyone deluded enough to think that third parties can win elections. The Greens will lose in 2018 (they did) and 2020. Do you know why the Greens will lose? Why the Libertarian Party will lose? Why all third parties will lose? Because the system is set up to make sure they lose. You can call that cheating, just like the articles cited by Bernie Bros talk about cheating in the legal sense, all the while lacking actual laws to bring charges against perpetrators. The system works a particular way because it is set up that way. Making memes and spreading apathy and discontent will not win you elections. It will simply ensure that the GOP holds power just long enough to destroy what is left of the United States.

In the meantime Sanders, who is a consummate politician, has altered the Democratic party so that what happened in 2016 won’t happen again. He changed the rules of the game to make sure it doesn’t happen again. He changed the system from within, which is what you have to do if you want to make effective change.

You cannot, repeat cannot, change the system from outside the system, and the system is only set up to allow Democrats and Republicans on the ballot in the majority of states. That means joining and changing either the Democrats (like Bernie Sanders has done) or the Republicans (like the Tea Partiers have done) but you cannot elect national representatives from any of the dozens of third parties and make effective change. Bernie Sanders proved this with his entire career in Washington.

So good for you, Bernie Bros. You can point to articles to bolster you and your followers apathy and resistance. I hope that cold comfort soothes you when the Democrats don’t reclaim the House and the Senate and Donald Trump and his hold on all three branches of government makes sure that the presidency never leaves the hands of his family. Kiss the ring of the new American kings and be thankful for the crusts of bread they leave you.

Postscript

We avoided the worst. The House of Representatives flipped by 39 or 40 seats, depending on how the ballot stuffing inquest turns out in North Carolina. Even Texas went more blue this election than has been seen in a decade or more. So, imminent death of the union averted? Maybe? We’ll see.

I added the Robert Reich video to the middle of this article because it was yet another irritant that showed up at about the same time that the framework of this article was written on G+ and I didn’t stumble across it again until long after I had hit publish on the parts that evolved from discussions on G+. Everyone thinks they know what the solution to a problem is. They never seem to understand the true complexities of the problem.