Preet Bharara – RAnt(hony)-ings

#MAGA: Quid Pro Quo or Quod Erat Demonstrandum?

Mr. Trump, the Orange Hate-Monkey, keeps insisting there was no quid pro quo in his phone call with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. It’s interesting that he keeps using that phrase. Quid pro quo. He uses like he knows what it means, and his supporters respond like they know what it means.

But they don’t know what it means. Most English speakers don’t know what it means. Quid pro quo is meant to equate to tit for tat or a favor for a favor. Which is what the transcript that Mr. Trump keeps saying exonerated him reveals. He explicitly asks for a favor in exchange for a favor.

On July 25, during a roughly 30-minute phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, our commander in chief engaged in not one, but two acts of bribery — one of the only high crimes, along with treason, specifically delineated by our Constitution.
“You just added another word,” McCarthy said. “No, it’s in the transcript,” Pelley responded. “He said — ‘I’d like you to do a favor though?” McCarthy asked, incredulous. “Yes,” Pelley responded once more, “it’s in the White House transcript.”
The reason McCarthy refused to accept that Trump said those words is because he knew they fit the definition of solicitation to a T. Nobody literally says “Here’s a bribe,” but “I would like you to do us a favor, though” is about as close as it gets.
Washington Post – The transcript Trump released is still the only evidence needed to impeach him

…He engages in two illegal acts in the transcript that he keeps insisting exonerated him. Then he uses the phrase “there was no quid pro quo.” Oddly enough, he is telling the truth when he says that. Think on that for a minute. Donald J. Trump, the president that has told more lies in his few short years as president than any one person can do in the course of a lifetime, is telling the truth about there not being a quid pro quo in that telephone conversation. There was no quid pro quo, if you revert to the meaning of the words as they were used in latin.

The Latin phrase corresponding to the usage of quid pro quo in English is do ut des (Latin for “I give, so that you may give”). Other languages continue to use do ut des for this purpose, while quid pro quo (or its equivalent qui pro quo, as widely used in Italian, French and Spanish) still keeps its original meaning of something being unwillingly mistaken, or erroneously told or understood, instead something else.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So he’s not substituting something for the thing that he’s promising. He’s not trying to pull the wool over the eyes of Volodymyr Zelensky, trying to get something for nothing. Which is completely the opposite of Donald Trump’s standard of practice. He steals from everybody else, all through his life, and now this time, when he honestly offers a favor for a favor, he gets in trouble. In any other transaction with Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky would have been right to adhere to Caveat Emptor. But this time, Mr. Trump is being honest.

Do me a favor, and I’ll do you a favor. In every other instance in his life, he’d crawfish on that promise. Welsh on the deal. Or to use language that isn’t taken from gangster movies, stab his business partner in the back. He’s rightly pissed off at this. There was no quid pro quo, no attempt to get out of doing what was promised. Donald Trump would have given Volodymyr Zelensky exactly what he wanted in exchange for Zelensky doing what Mr. Trump asked for.

English speakers do this frequently. Reverse the meanings of words used in casual parlance. Sometimes they do this by accident. Sometimes it is done on purpose. But it happens a lot, and you have to wonder if Mr. Trump knows about this reversal of the phrases definition. Does he know, and this is just another showman’s wink at the camera?

It is just too bad for Donald Trump that even asking for the things he asked for is illegal. Even if he has to give the thing that President Zelensky wanted without getting anything in return. Which makes him even madder. No one steals from the Don! Except there is no theft here. Congress approved the aid. It goes without any strings attached, and asking for personal favors in exchange for unconditional aid is looking for bribes. Again, illegal, even if you don’t get the proceeds you ask for.

Ask any lawyer. Asking for a bribe, what in legal terms in the United States and England is defined as a quid pro quo, even if you don’t receive the payment, is a serious crime. Worse than lying under oath, even. The transcript that Mr. Trump caused to be released and insists exonerated him, proves that he asked for a bribe. That is quod erat demonstrandum or Q.E.D. Another latin phrase that Mr. Trump and his supporters should familiarize themselves with. This one means exactly what it says, unlike quid pro quo.

“The very thing it was required to have shown.”
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If it please the court? I’d like to enter exhibit A into the record.

Stay Tuned with Preet – Impeaching 45 (with Susan Glasser)

..In which Preet and Susan discuss just how the transcript is QED for Trump’s criminality (without using the phrase directly) and their wonderment that this farce of the Trump presidency has been allowed to continue to destroy the government and reputation of the United States for as long as it has.

I’d love to have a membership to the Insider. I hear it makes a great gift.

Technological Indigestion

“We think of capitalism as being locked in an ideological battle with socialism, but we never really saw that capitalism might be defeated by its own child — technology.”
Eric Weinstein via Andrew Yang & Vox

Stay Tuned: Mueller Speaks & The Underdog (With Andrew Yang)

Stay Tuned: Mueller Speaks & The Underdog (With Andrew Yang) – May 30, 2019

There were several statements from Andrew Yang in the episode that were quoteworthy. The Vox article is quite quoteworthy as well.

“The greatest danger,” he told me, is that, “the truly rich are increasingly separated from the lives of the rest of us so that they become largely insensitive to the concerns of those who still earn by the hour.” If that happens, he warns, “they will probably not anticipate many of the changes, and we will see the beginning stirrings of revolution as the cost for this insensitivity.”
Why capitalism won’t survive without socialism

Socialism and capitalism were never really in opposition anywhere aside from inside the minds of Marxists and robber barons.

The opposing force for Authoritarianism is deeper than socialism, which is why acceptance of socialism as the good is irrelevant in the long run. Authoritarianism is the godhead. The worship of absolute authority over all things living. What opposes it is just as strong, but largely unvoiced. It is an expression of the value of each human life. It is at its core humanism, the valuing of the human over the spiritual or supernatural. The movement that was spawned with the enlightenment and has been forgotten by most people today – Authoritarianism vs. Humanism.

Capitalism and socialism are not in opposition. Capitalism and socialism can be present in the same mixed system because they deal with different parts of human interaction. Profit is not evil. Profit, when properly managed, is the reward for the entrepreneurial spirit. Profit, when held as an inviolable sacrement, leads to worship of the wealthy, what Objectivism has turned into over the last half-century. The Trump administration is laboring under this delusion of money. This holy profit-taking. Trump has started beating the drum of red baiting. He is promoting the same old schtick that Nixon and McCarthy did so well with two generations ago. I’ve said this from the moment that he announced his candidacy and he’s proven it daily since the broken system we live in delivered him into office. Trump believes in the zero-sum game and is right now rigging it to favor the wealthy who currently own our country – Delusion of Money.

Threatening First Amendment Rights? #ImpeachTrump

We’ve heard the phrase constitutional crisis all our lives. It’s a phrase I’ve heard and seen attached to many different people for many different reasons over the course of my 50+ years. The phrase is more than just a little misleading. As I’ve heard several pundits note in the last few years, the United States is always in a constitutional crisis because there is always someone out there doing something that is questionable from a constitutional basis. But Mr. Trump represents a level of disregard for lawful behavior that shocks even a dyed-in-the-wool non-conformist like myself.

I mean, what exactly does somebody like Trump pray for?
Stonekettle Station

Jim’s quote concerning the Capital Gazette mass shooting is typical for the everyday crisis we deal with in Trump’s America. The recitation of the conservative mantra of thoughts and prayers after tragedies rang hollow even before the current level of disdain for lawful behavior was exhibited by the most corrupt and compromised leader in US history. To hear those words come out of his mouth is to need to dig your own ears out with an icepick. It offends the senses. It is so obvious a lie, this fakir pretending that he prays for anything, this narcissist, this solipsist? There is nothing greater in his mind than he is, how could he possibly pray to anyone or anything?

Funny thing though. Funny thing. Just last night, at yet another political rally, President Trump was telling us, yet again, how the Press — the PRESS — is the enemy of America.
Stonekettle Station

I can’t put too fine a point on this one. When Mr. Trump trotted out the phrase enemy of the people and applied it to the United States free press, the world’s free press, inspiring acts of hatred across the world in response including the deaths of five people in Washington DC, that was the moment when the very notion that Mr. Trump could be allowed to leave office unmolested ceased to have any weight. No one who utters that phrase from a position of authority can be trusted unsupervised from that point forward. His time as a free man has come to an end. It is merely a matter of time now before he will be in shackles and facing the judgement of the American people for his assorted crimes. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump has committed crimes, and it didn’t take four years of fruitless investigation to prove this.

On The Media Enemy of the People August 3, 2018

At a rally in Tampa, Florida, Trump supporters attacked CNN reporter Jim Acosta, prompting the president to double down on his anti-press “Enemy of the People” rhetoric. A look at how and why the president incites his base — and where it all might lead. And, as the regulatory battle surrounding 3D gun blueprints rages on, we dive into the worldview of Cody Wilson, the man who started the controversy. Plus, why we’re still living in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s killing, six years later.

Politics Podcast: Should The Press Respond To Trump’s Attacks?

Fivethirtyeight Politics Podcast: Should The Press Respond To Trump’s Attacks? AUG. 6, 2018, AT 5:19 PM (538’s embeds have gotten even worse with time -ed.)

President Trump’s attacks on the press have reached a new level in recent weeks. On Sunday, he called the press, “very dangerous & sick” and wrote that the media can “cause War.” The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast team talks about what the goal of the president’s rhetoric is and how the press should respond.

Are there limits on speech under the first amendment? Yes. Yes there are. You won’t hear about those real limits from the Mr. Trump or from any conservative pundit in the US today. None of the news organizations, not even FOX, have breached those limits. Football players peacefully protesting by taking a knee have not breached those limits. Yelling fire in a burning theater doesn’t breach those limits. What are those limits, then? Threatening violence. Inciting a riot. Falsifying data in pursuit of personal gain. In other words, what the Mr. Trump does nearly every time he rage tweets.

If I threatened violence like Trump does on social media, Twitter and Facebook would suspend my accounts, no matter what the provocation was. Hell, both platforms have suspended me for far, far less.

It’s not just that Twitter continues to protect this lunatic, the REALLY insane part: NO ONE IN THE ADMINISTRATION NOR IN CONGRESS has so far addressed this madness.

No republican. No democrat.

Congress has abdicated its duty to America.

We reached a point where it’s not enough to throw Trump out of office, CONGRESS needs to be replaced in its entirety. If you sons of bitches don’t show up this time and remove these faithless cowards from office, if you don’t start electing better people, then you are complicit in the destruction of the Republic.
Stonekettle Station

As I said previously elsewhere “Imagine the difference we would see in the world around us if authorities had arrested Donald Trump the first time he incited a riot?” Because he has done that. He’s done it more than once, and no one has ever suggested he be prosecuted. His social media accounts should be banned for violating clearly stated boundaries on those media systems. Do not just suspend his accounts, ban them. He should be kicked out of every decent establishment in society along with anyone who sides with him publicly. The cost will be higher now than it would have been back in the campaign days. Higher on all sides, unfortunately. But he has to go. We cannot allow him to go unpunished. Allowing him to walk away without exacting a price on his behavior from him will send the wrong message and leave us unprotected from the next demagogue to come along thinking they will use the system for their own ends. This has to be stopped here, and it should have been stopped before he took the oath of office because we knew he was dirty even then.

Facebook

Stitcher – Stay Tuned with Preet – Putin Enemy #1 (with Bill Browder) – August 2nd, 2018

#TrumpEnemyofthePeople not the free press. Not the protestors. Not the liberals. The Mr. Trump is the enemy of the people, and it is about time we recognized this fact and demanded he be removed from office. Before he does something the system will not recover from.

I have a right to detest him. I have a right to despise everything he stands for. I despise his greed, his endless conceit, his avarice, his gluttony and his sloth, his deliberate stupidity, his staggering foolishness, and his towering ignorance touted as some sort of virtue. I am daily appalled by his open encouragement of the worse elements of our society, his abuse of power, his obvious lies, his casual racism, his gross misogyny, his swaggering jingoism, his prideful nationalism, his craven xenophobia, his quailing insecurities large and small, his childish need for revenge, the bottomless unplumbed depths of his cowardice, and the utter shallowness of his character.

But most of all, most of all, I despise the gleeful hypocrisy of his chanting supporters.
stonekettle.com

In my podcast feed for August 30, 2017. Detailing how Mr. Trump’s attacks on the media are groundbreaking. Worse than Richard Nixon, the last president to take out his aggression on the media.

https://rewire.news/multimedia/podcast/breach-trumps-media-vendetta-scarier-nixons/

Rick Perlstein, bestselling author of Nixonland and historian of the conservative movement, joins host Lindsay Beyerstein for a discussion of President Donald Trump’s attacks on the press. Perlstein argues that Trump is the ultimate Richard Nixon Republican, from his love-hate relationship with mass media to his preoccupation with vendettas.
While Nixon usually kept his gripes against the media private, Trump has made his battle with the media the signature fight of his administration. His tirades are also mobilizing bands of right-wing trolls to harass journalists online. As Trump’s popularity falls and the frustrations of his supporters rise, the situation is becoming increasingly explosive.
rewire.news

The problem here is that there is a thing called liberalism that isn’t political liberalism. Essentially, you have to be able to go where your news is and report the facts without inserting your own bias into the factual reporting. You have to be willing to listen and absorb without accepting. IF you cannot be liberal enough to entertain ideas that you don’t accept and report on them, then you can’t get to the objective facts in the first place, your bias will obscure objectivity no matter how hard you try.

This is why conservative news outlets will always fail unless they can establish authoritarian control (like Facebook) because, all things being equal, the truth will float to the surface eventually. And you can’t have the truth getting in the way of conservative ideals. That’s just not right. #ImpeachTrump

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Postscript

This was originally part of another article that I have now broken into three parts and appended more work to all three. All reasons to #ImpeachTrump:

In case you missed it, they impeached Trump. Fifty-two Republican Senators are now just as treasonous as their president is because of their votes. Only Mitt Romney can be called blameless on this subject.

Respect for Mitt Romney?

They ended up impeaching him twice.

Second Impeachment

There were a few less Republicans that were traitors that time. Still not enough to remove him or prevent a second attempt at an authoritarian takeover of our government.

(Deorangified)

Requiring Personal Loyalty? #ImpeachTrump

For Trump, loyalty to him is more important than loyalty to America.
1. “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” Trump told then FBI Director James Comey in January – even though FBI directors are supposed to be independent of a president, and Comey was only 4 years into a 10 year term. After Comey refused and continued to investigate possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, Trump fired him.
2. Preet Bharara, who had been the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Trump tried to create the same sort of patronage relationship with him that he did with Comey. Bharara’s office had been investigating Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Tom Price, and also looking into Russian money-laundering allegations against Deutsche Bank, Trump’s principal private lender. When Bharara didn’t play along, Trump fired him.
3. Although most of his Cabinet still don’t have top deputies in place, the White House has installed senior aides to monitor their loyalty. As Barry Bennett, a former Trump campaign adviser, explained to the Washington Post, “they’re functioning as the White House’s voice and ears in these departments.”
4. Last Monday, the White House invited reporters in to watch what was billed as a meeting of Trump’s Cabinet. After Trump spoke, he asked each of the Cabinet members around the table to briefly comment. Their statements were what you might expect from toadies surrounding a two-bit dictator.
5. His top advisers are his daughter, Ivanka, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
6. To run his legal defense and be his spokesman on the investigation into collusion with Russian operatives, Trump has hired Marc Kasowitz – who’s been Trump’s personal legal fixer for almost two decades – representing him in his failed libel lawsuit against a journalist, the Trump University fraud case that ended in January with a $25 million settlement from Trump, and candidate Trump’s response to allegations of sexual assault by multiple women last year. Bypassing the White House Counsel, Kasowitz has instructed White House aides to discuss the investigation as little as possible, and advised them about whether they should hire private lawyers.
When loyalty trumps integrity, we no longer have a government of laws. We have a government by and for Trump.
What do you think?
Robert Reich

Which is why #ImpeachTrump will be a thing, if not for any other reason. He will have to be impeached because he cannot do the job the presidency requires. He cannot because he doesn’t understand what a president is and so cannot fathom the responsibility of the office. He’s not alone in this. There are many other Tea Party Republicans who don’t understand the responsibility of their offices. Anyone who thinks they are in office to execute the things they believe is not representing anyone other than themselves. This is the problem with conservatism in general, Republicanism and to some extent neo-liberalism and the Democratic party of the Clinton era.

All of these groups were made of individuals that were put into positions of power because they were sure of the things they believed and could present their certainty as a selling point. That is not the way that a representative democracy works in principle. A representative democracy is made up of a power-wielding citizenry that delegates portions of its authority and power to trusted individuals who will act in their collective interest. The federal and state legislatures should feel they are as beholden to the homeless in the cities they represent as they are to the people who fund their campaigns. The truth of their corruption by campaign finance bribery is evident in the way they treat the least of us in our midst.

It is a troubling time in America, with dark possibilities ahead of us.

Facebook status backdated to the blog.