KIKO'S HOUSE

Joyeux Noel et bonne année de Kiko’s House à vous

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 05:01:00 +0000

STATE THEATER, NEWARK, DELAWARE (ca. 1980)

Barr Keeps Covering For Trump's Crimes. The Time Has Come To Impeach Him.

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 12:18:00 +0000

DREW ANGERER / GETTY IMAGES

Now that Donald Trump has been whacked with two articles of impeachment, it is time to begin impeachment proceedings against his latter-day enabler, collaborator and partner in crime, Attorney General William Barr.

There have been bad attorneys general in the past. Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft come to mind, while an argument can be made that Janet Reno wasn't so hot. But no matter the era or the president, even the worst AGs took seriously their role as the nation's chief law enforcement officer. But Barr is so corrupt -- consistently siding with the president over his own staff and the FBI -- that Trump has used the cover he has provided him as permission to cheat at elections.

Barr's latest expedition into the dark side of servility is a whopper.

On Monday, the Department of Justice inspector general, Michael Horowitz, released the findings of his inquiry into the origins of the FBI's investigation into Trump's collusion with Russian to undermine the 2016 election, which eventually grew into the two-year investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The Horowitz investigation had been demanded by congressional Republicans who bought into Trump's claims that he has been the victim of a "deep state" conspiracy to smear him with lies, which is kind of rich since he is being impeached for abusing the power of his office to try to smear a Democratic candidate with lies. (The other article of impeachment is contempt of Congress.)

Anyhow, Horowitz found absolutely no evidence of a conspiracy. There were some procedural issues with the Carter Page FISA warrant and such, but the IG concluded that the FBI acted properly in looking into Trump and his campaign.

Trump reacted to the Horowitz report by throwing one of his patented fits. And lying some more. He claimed the report shows that the investigation into him was "concocted" and that it "was an overthrow of government, this was an attempted overthrow -- and a lot of people were in on it."

These claims are, of course, literally the opposite of what the IG found, but he was backed up by Barr, who further fed Trump's autocratic delusions by throwing his own FBI employees under the bus in statements on Monday and Tuesday in falsely accusing them of starting the investigation "on the thinnest of suspicions" and then bizarrely claiming, in taking a page from his master's playbook, that "the evidence produced by the [Mueller] investigation was consistently exculpatory," which is to say Trump and his campaign did no wrong.

"I think our nation was turned on its head for three years based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by a completely irresponsible press," Barr told NBC News. "I think there were gross abuses . . . and inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI."

In other words, Barr is absolving Trump of all blame although 34 people were indicted, seven pleaded guilty and five others were convicted. Mueller, who stopped short of calling for conspiracy charges to be filed against Trump after he leaves office, did find 10 instances were he obstructed of justice. And it's a safe bet that if Trump weren't protected by that invisible shield of executive privilege, he might already have joined his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, his campaign manager Paul Manafort and his longest of longtime advisers Roger Stone, in prison.

Barr said the final and more thoroughly considered word would be that of John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, whom he hand-picked to perform a separate, criminal investigation into the origins of the Russia probe.

The AG told NBC News that Durham's review could reach an "important watershed" in the late spring or early summer, just as the presidential campaigns are intensifying.

Of course.

Donald B. Ayer, who preceded Barr as deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, warned that Barr "is bringing to bear, in all of his conduct here, a perspective on the law that the president is all-powerful and should be able to do pretty much whatever he wants. And I think we're not done yet. It seems likely that Barr will do some pretty bad things with whatever facts Durham finds, by viewing them through the lens of his twisted concept of executive power."

This is not mere partisan hackery.

Barr, in publicly accusing his own staff of screwing up while buying into sinister conspiracy theories, is sending the message that our right to free and fair elections has been abrogated. Which it has, but to hear the attorney general infer as much is an outrage, and all the more so because Trump's congressional allies have largely given up disputing the facts Barr continues trying to subvert.

There is only one way to hold Barr accountable even as Trump lays the groundwork for slithering off the impeachment hook after a Senate trial stemming from his efforts to fix the 2020 election. That would be articles of impeachment charging the attorney general with obstruction of justice and abuse of power.

Yeah, everybody's exhausted by all this shit. But Barr has to be stopped.

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 22:29:00 +0000

MORE HERE.

The False Dawn Of Impeachment: Has Trump Broken America Beyond Repair?

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 05:00:00 +0000

CHRISTINA ANIMASHAUN / VOX

These should be heady days for anyone who detests Donald Trump and what he has done to America. He is caught in a vise of incontrovertible evidence of innumerable high crimes and misdemeanors. House Democrats are moving expeditiously to file articles of impeachment after carefully building the case that he should be removed from office now because he is a present and continuing threat to our democracy. So why do I have the feeling that I am looking at a false dawn?

It is not that Trump will be acquitted at a Senate trial that he and his congressional sycophancy will try to turn into a circus.

It is not that Rudy Giuliani will continue to torment us with his schizophrenic ravings about deep-state conspiracies.

It is not that the president will reliably suck up to Vladimir Putin and otherwise show his fealty to our enemies.

It is not that he will continue to manipulate a mainstream media that remains clueless about how to honestly report on his lies and deceits.

Or that public opinion will have been little moved by trying to get rid of a president through impeachment for only the third time in our nation's history.

No, that sinking feeling comes from the fear that America already was broken before Trump became president (with an assist from Putin) and he has now broken it beyond repair.

This is not so much liberal tear jerking. It is a consequence of the knowledge that tribalism in all its destructive manifestations is destroying the guts of our democracy. That electing a new president and a Republican Party that comes to its senses after Republicans invited a pussy-grabbing reality TV star to wreck it -- both prayed for consequences of the great American pendulum swinging back to center -- may be welcome tonics for our dysfunctional political system but still won't cure what ails us.

Americans always have had an unjustifiably lofty view of their society, which is why they are able to look down their upturned noses as Tutsis beat up on Hutus in Rwanda, Serbs beat up on Croats in the Balkans, Shiites beat up on Sunnis in Iraq and Buddhists beat up on Muslims in Myanmar, to name just a few of the blood-soaked conflicts in recent history.

Americans believe they're beyond such tribalism, and indeed the Founding Fathers were determined to build a democracy where the individual was more important than the tribe. That failed spectacularly in a little dustup called the Civil War, and the biggest message underlying the election of Donald Trump is that it is still failing.

The message within that message as we slouch toward whatever Trump's fate may be -- if indeed he is fated -- is that he did not make America what it is. To the contrary, America made Trump president because of what it has become.

Those red state-blue state maps that are popping up everywhere as the most important election since the last most important election approaches are not merely graphic representations of the American body politic of recent years. They vividly and shockingly illustrate the parlous condition of our 240-year-old democracy.

A tribe of white voters predominate in red states in the rural interior. They are for the most part nationalist in outlook, evangelical and dominate the Republican Party.

A tribe of non-whites predominate in blue states on the coasts. They are for the most part are urbanized, global in outlook, less religious and dominate the Democratic Party.

But again, that is giving politics too much credit -- or blame, as it were.

Tribalism begins to destabilize a democracy when it calcifies into something bigger and more intense than our smaller loyalties such as our favorite sports team, pop star or brand of fast-food chicken sandwich. That destabilization, as pioneering blogger Andrew Sullivan has written, occurs when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole and tribes become enemies.

And that is where we are today despite the gauzy view of many pundits that all that the national car needs is an oil change.

It is convenient but inaccurate to suggest that tribalism evaporated after the Civil War and re-emerged only in the last several years as politics became so overtly tribal and hence divisive. In fact, tribalism never went away.

Tribalism merely was subsumed by waves of immigrants who were assimilated into society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and then the two world wars, which acted as huge unifiers. In the case of World War II and the years following, blacks were integrated into the military, industry and society at large, and nearly 40 percent of black voters called themselves Republicans, the once proud party of Lincoln.

But by 1964, tribalism was back with a vengeance.

Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign drove most blacks away from the GOP and that re-racialization continued apace in the early 1970s with Richard Nixon's so-called Southern Strategy in response to the civil rights movement, Ronald Reagan's unflattering characterizations of poor blacks in the 1980s, and Republican Governor Pete Wilson's unapologetic loathing of the Latino immigrants pouring into California in the 1990s.

By the time the first red-blue maps appeared in the 2000 presidential race, abortion and gay rights had further split the two parties as holier-than-thou Republicans launched a series of culture wars and self-righteous Democrats were offended.

Behind the national electoral draw that year between Al Gore and George Bush were the two tribes so recognizable today, and the Supreme Court ruling handing the presidency to Bush ended -- probably forever -- the Founders' intention that the high court be nonpartisan, which is to say nontribal.

Then came 2008 and an even deeper tribal fracturing over race with the election of Barack Obama, the first African-American president, as well as the emergence of Fox News and the Internet and social media, both crucibles for right-wing extremism that underlie many of the horrific mass murders that have become the soundtrack of our country.

And on top of all that, Republicans and Democrats don't merely disagree with their opponents' views these days, they disagree angrily and sometimes in violent terms over the other tribe's values, each side claiming to be more loyal to mother, god and country than the other as emotion reliably supplants reason.

Can you say Brett Kavanaugh?

With the three core components of tribalism -- race, religion and geography -- defining the political parties, 2016 was bound to be a watershed election.

But little did we suspect that a profoundly unqualified narcissist, career crook, pathological liar and misogynist wearing a red Make America Great Again baseball cap who made vague promises to shake up Washington would face off against an eminently qualified, if flawed, woman who proudly wore a lifetime of public service on her sleeve and promised to build on the Obama legacy while bearing the scars of 30 years of virulent right-wing attacks.

Trump, of course, lost the popular vote but eked out an Electoral College victory over Hillary Clinton.

While the pernicious consequences of the Russian effort to sabotage the Clinton campaign cannot be underestimated, Trump built his backdoor victory on opportunism that caught liberals and pollster alike unaware. His claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose the support of his followers lays bare a deep-rooted tribal animosity -- a toxic brew of fear and hate -- toward anyone who is not like them, as well as an addiction to the rhetorical extremism that is Trump's stock in trade.

Americans, at least those of us who care about such things when not arguing over whether the New England Patriots (pun intended) are the best team ever, have assumed that democracy was on autopilot.

That the worst excesses would sort themselves out as that political pendulum swung back and forth. That constitutional checks and balances would assure that the pendulum would return to center. That our capacity for moderation, compassion and forgiveness ran deeper than our baser instincts. That we would stop talking past each other and talk to each other.

But none of that took into account that beyond halcyon skies, amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties above those enameled plains, we were members of tribes first and Americans second.

Having just read a great book (Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder) which chronicles the murders of millions of men, women and children by Stalin and Hitler before and during the Second World War in horrifying detail, I am convinced more than ever that tribalism is in human DNA. How else to explain what is happening in Poland, which suffered grievously under Stalin and Hitler a mere blink of the eye ago in the long arc of history, but is lurching to the right because of the siren call of fascism as if that bloody interregnum of mass murder of one's own people in the service of megalomania disguised as national destiny had never occurred?

This makes finding a way out of America's national nightmare all the more difficult because it would require closing the gap between our tribes, as well as changing or at least diluting the mutations of the political parties.

The revolution will not be televised because there isn't going to be one. And the impeachment of Donald Trump, as necessary as it is, will not begin to close that gap and probably will make it only wider.

Barr, Giuliani Show Why Trump Poses A Present & Continuing Threat To America

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 12:51:00 +0000

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP-GETTY IMAGES

The truth is the most precious commodity in a state run by an authoritarian, and so it has been in the Age of Donald Trump. Look no further than the president's resident sage, Rudy Giuliani, who has proudly declared "truth isn't truth." So when the truth does out, as it has in the case of John Durham, who has perhaps inadvertently delivered something of a twofer for the forces of good, that is cause for both celebration and concern.

Trump's long-propounded claim that copiously document proof of Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election was all a big hoax has been central to his assault on the truth, as has more recently been that lie's wicked stepbrother, that it actually was Ukraine who meddled.

Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, privately asked Connecticut U.S. Attorney Durham, who has been carrying out Attorney General William Barr's so-called review of the origins of the FBI's investigation into Russian election interference and the Trump's campaign involvement in it for a forthcoming report. Inconveniently for Trump and Barr (Horowitz is genuinely independent and doesn't have a horse in the race), Durham has found that the basis of the investigation was legitimate, according to news reports.

The cause for celebration is obvious, while the cause for concern is less immediately apparent until you understand that Barr's exertions, whether whitewashing the Mueller report or trying to prop up Trump's big lie by calling in Durham, are all the evidence you need that the constitutional experts called by House Democrats this week are correct when they say impeachment proceedings must continue apace because Trump poses a present and continuing threat to our democracy.

Look no further than the Ukraine scandal in which the president tried to extort a foreign leader into helping him rig the 2020 election as the Russians did in 2016, and you understand that it is a dead certainty that he will continue using the levers of government to corrupt it on his behalf.

Speaking of present and continuing threats, look no further than Giuliani himself.

The sociopathic ringleader of Trump's Ukraine shakedown has traveled to Budapest and Kiev where he is meeting with shadowy Ukrainian figures to keep trying to build the thoroughly debunked case that Joe Biden and his son acted corruptly in Ukraine. Giuliani is participating in the filming of a fake "documentary" designed to make that narrative seem true. Yes, Giuliani is still trying to achieve the same goals that drove the corrupt plot for which Trump is being impeached back in Washington.

The integral element of Trump's continuing misconduct is Russia.

"Russia. It's about Russia," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday in announcing that she had instructed investigators to begin drafting articles of impeachment. "All roads lead to Putin. Understand that."

Indeed, Russia was the beneficiary of Trump's decision to withhold nearly $400 million in military aid unless Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky danced to his tune.

Two dates are especially important here in the context of Trump's relationship with Russia and his snarling unrepentedness.

On July 24, Robert Mueller delivered a muted but still powerful condemnation of Russia's interference in the 2016 election with the Trump campaign's willing help, as well as Trump's multiple efforts to obstruct the special counsel's investigation, in an appearance before three congressional committees where he was grilled about his report on the Russia scandal.

On July 25, an obviously unchastened Trump rang up Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to tell him he would have to interfere in the 2020 election by announcing a corruption investigation into the Bidens and play along in acknowledging that it was Ukraine and not Russia who hacked all those Democratic emails in 2016 if he wanted that military aid, let alone a coveted White House visit.

Pelosi's House Democrats are now considering including articles of impeachment that address Trump's ties to Moscow as detailed in the Mueller report and the president's efforts to shut down or curtail the special counsel's investigation. These probably would include obstruction of justice in addition to three articles stemming from the Ukraine scandal -- abuse of power, obstruction of Congress and possibly bribery.

I had preferred that the articles be confined to the Ukraine scandal in the service of keeping things simple, but that was shortsighted. We have only one chance to impeach the most corrupt president in American history, a monster who has committed -- and in whose name his minions have committed -- an array of offenses so staggeringly immense and evil that it still is almost impossible to grasp the scope. So we need to pile on.

I write this knowing that not even impeachment is likely to curtail the present and continuing threat of Trump, but we have to take that shot. The evidence is overwhelming. Waiting for the November 2020 election is not an option, obsessing about whether impeachment might make Democratic candidates more vulnerable in swing districts is a waste of time, and while Don McGahn, Mick Mulvaney, Mike Pompeo and others should be compelled to testify, waiting interminably for court rulings is not an option.

As Pelosi recognizes, we have to take that shot now. For history and for America.

On Friends Lost: 'Ere The Bonnie Boat Was Won As We Sailed Into The Mystic'

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 11:50:00 +0000

YOUTUBE

(A REGRETTABLY ANNUAL SUBMISSION.)

So there you are approaching your 73nd year floating merrily down the stream, needing to reach for the paddle only occasionally, while filling bird feeders and trying to stay on your feet in the winter and weeding vegetables and working on your tan in the summer, making sure there are plenty of dog treats in your pocket and that your True Love has fresh cut flowers no matter the season, keeping your hand in the writing game with a blog post here and a book there, when the phone rings.

"Our old friend So and So is dead," the caller says solemnly.

Far too much of that going on. But at the risk of seeming maudlin, my thoughts turn to friends departed with the waning of the year, and I'd like to remember them:

Patrice Adams, Susie Ambry, Bob Andrews, Lou Angeli, Billy Burger, Beth Gulledge Bailey, Nancy Bennett, Ralph Borgess, Becky Buckson, David Carruthers, Jasmine Clower, Terry Cousins, Michael Crowley, Joe Cunane, Dale Dallabrida, Paul Damico, Tom Daniels, Eddie Day, Mark Delmerico, John DiGiovanni, Robert Mapes Dodge Jr., Bob Dorough, Jeff Duperon, Doug Eppes, Andy Ercole, Nick Fallon, John Felton, Larry Fenza, Bill Fleishman, Michael Frettoloso, Charlie Gibb, Andy Goessling, John Gregg, Steve Gregg, Bob Grimm, Brad Grimm, Willie Hemphill, Vic Holveck, Brenda Ireland, Redz Ireland, Darryl Ray Jenkins, Bill Jennings, Vic Karakul, Dave Kibler, Pattie Kibler, Shannon Kibler, Jerry Kirk, Wendy Knoedler, K. J. Linhein, Jim McCarthy, David McCloud, Michael McDyre, Muggs McGinnis, Donna Manning, Joe Mauro, Larry Michele, Dorothy Miller, Collette Molloy, Tom Molyneux, Dorothy Munroe, Alan Murphy, Larry Newbold, David O'Brien, Mario Pazzaglini, Dale Peck, Prairie Weather, Doug Prior, Debby Roberts, Vic Sadot, Paul Salcido, Rochelle Samuels, Frank Scarpitti, Mark Scherer, Rob Schmitt, John Southard, Bob Stewart, Paul Storm, Genny Porter Swan, Alan Teel, Mary Slaughter Tuke, Nick Tuke, Ed Wesolowski, Bill Windley.

Folks who passed since this was last posted in December 2018 are in boldface. Please forgive any omissions and let me know who I might have missed by emailing me at kikokimba@gmail.com.

§

If I could take only one song with me to that proverbial desert island, it would be "Into the Mystic" by Van Morrison. It has been a steady companion since I bought his great Moondance album in 1970. A snippet of the lyric:

We were born before the wind
Also younger than the sun
Ere the bonnie boat was won
As we sailed into the mystic

Hark, now hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly
Into the mystic

And when that fog horn blows
I will be coming home, mmm mmm
And when the fog horn blows
I want to hear it
I don't have to fear it . . .

Too late to stop now

"Into the Mystic" -- the words and melody ethereally flowing together as one -- is about a spiritual quest. (I know that’s true because Wikipedia told me so.) But over the years the song has become much more -- an affirmation of life for me, and I would like to think for my generation, as well, should we choose to embrace its sentiments, an anthem of lives lived as we float down that stream, merrily or otherwise, after leaving this mortal coil.

"To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart," said the late great Daniel Patrick Moynihan, although life and death do not, of course, discriminate according to race, nationality, creed or gender.

I am honored that my path intersected with friends departed, and I am a better person because it did. The fog horn has blown for them and they will be coming home.

It is indeed too late to stop now.

A Watershed Day: Dems Lower The Boom, Repubs Regroup & Trump Squawks

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 23:17:00 +0000

SUSAN WALSH / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

It is a huge moment when Democrats and Republicans actually agree on something of substance: They now agree that in an effort spearheaded by Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump forced out the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and then pushed Kiev to announce investigations into his political rivals. But it is there, as the president's impeachment enters its penultimate phase in the House, that any agreement ends. Democrats believe that extraordinary series of events were criminal and demand Trump's removal while Republicans say he did nothing wrong.

Given the Alice in Wonderland aspect of other Republican defenses of the president, this acknowledgement of the facts of the matter, such as they are, is a Democratic tactical victory on a watershed day in only the fourth presidential impeachment inquiry in U.S. history.

In the face of a deeply damning House Intelligence Committee report made public on Tuesday by committee chairman Adam Schiff that concluded the president put politics ahead of the national interest in an effort to tilt the outcome of the 2020 election, Trump's congressional sycophancy has tacitly acknowledged that the best defense is to simply say that there is nothing wrong with that.

There was nothing wrong with Trump leveraging nearly $400 million in military assistance to fight Russian aggression and an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in exchange for investigations of a former vice president and 2020 adversary, and his son. There was nothing wrong with Devin Nunes, the ranking Intel Committee Republican and purveyor of the most outlandish of conspiracy theories, working with Giuliani by trying to foist on Ukrainian government officials the debunked notion that Ukraine not Russia meddled in the 2016 election. Okay, Russia might have meddled, but Ukraine did the same thing, acknowledge some Republicans. And there was nothing wrong with the White House withholding documents and ordering prospective witnesses not to cooperate with Congress.

In the starkest of terms, the Intel Committee report concludes that "The founding fathers prescribed a remedy for a chief executive who places his personal interests above those of the country: impeachment."

It asserts that Trump's "scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential re-election campaign."

Left unsaid is that Trump was brazenly supporting Russia by undercutting Ukraine.

The report, based on more than two months of sometimes searing testimony, much of it from administration officials who defied the president, now goes to the House Judiciary Committee, which on Wednesday began holding its own hearings in the run-up to deciding what the articles of impeachment should be. The first three witnesses were constitutional scholars who said the president's conduct in the Ukraine scandal alone warrants his removal from office.

The articles will likely include abuse of power, obstruction of Congress and possibly bribery, but although Democrats control the House and have the votes to impeach, they are divided as to whether to include articles beyond the Ukraine scandal that were outlined in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on the Russia scandal. These potentially include obstruction of justice and other "high crimes."

If the Democrats continue to fast-track the proceedings, an impeachment vote is possible before the Christmas holiday with a trial in the Republican-controlled Senate presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts commencing in January.

The developments further tie together the Russia and Ukraine scandals.

As 2018 drew to a close, Mueller had secured the cooperation of Giuliani's predecessor, Michael Cohen, longest of longtime Trump advisers Roger Stone was about to be indicted, and Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was in jail after pleading guilty to multiple felonies, where Mueller's prosecutors were pressing him to explain why he had given presidential polling data to an associate with alleged ties to Russian intelligence.

It was in this moment of crisis, writes Rosalind Helderman in The Washington Post, that Giuliani hit upon the idea of focusing on Ukraine to take the heat off Trump, and the campaign to vilify the Bidens and blame Ukraine for 2016 election meddling was born. That is beyond dispute; Giuliani himself admits as much.

Trump's Republican congressional allies had released their own report on Monday condemning the impeachment effort as illegitimate and asserting that the president was not seeking personal political advantage, but was instead urging Ukraine to address corruption.

"I knew they were hot and heavy on this Russian collusion thing, even though I knew 100 percent that it was false," Giuliani recently told conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck. "I said to myself, 'Hallelujah.' I've got what a defense lawyer always wants: I can go prove someone else committed this crime."

Ultimately, Mueller would find that Moscow's efforts to interfere in the 2016 campaign were "sweeping and systematic," but that the evidence he was able to get despite White House resistance could not establish that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia. But in one of the more delicious ironies in presidential history, Giuliani set out to defend the president against the possibility of impeachment and instead helped create the basis for impeachment.

And there is another irony: Despite Trump's stonewalling, the House Democrats' strongest evidence came directly from the White House in the form of chief of staff Mick Mulvaney's disastrous admission there was a quid pro quo and the testimony of other administration officials.

Giuliani is now the subject of several investigations, while phone records obtained by the Intel Committee reveal that he and Lev Parnas, one of his indicted Ukrainian associates, exchanged a flurry of phone calls with Nunes amid Giuliani's effort to dig up dirt on the Bidens, while Giuliani called the White House repeatedly on the day that Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was abruptly ordered to return to Washington.

The president, in Europe for the 70th anniversary of the NATO alliance, savaged Schiff as "deranged" and "sick," yet again accused Democrats of trying to overturn the results of the 2016 elections through an impeachment inquiry he said "turned out to be a hoax."

"It's done for purely political gain," Trump said. "They're going to see whether or not they can do something in 2020 because otherwise they’re going to lose."

Why The Steele Dossier Has Not Just Held Up, But Has Grown In Importance

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 05:00:00 +0000

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY SEAN McCABE / VANITY FAIR

Has there ever been a major American political scandal that came with its own roadmap?

The Teapot Dome was long hiding in plain view, while the dots in Watergate, from third-rate burglary to Richard Nixon's constitutional perfidy, remained unconnected for two years. But in the case of the Russia scandal, there was the Steele dossier, a series of blockbuster memos that not only laid out the collusion between Moscow and Donald Trump's presidential campaign in detail, but did so practically as it was unfolding and Trump and his sycophancy were beginning their long campaign to vilify, misrepresent and try to bury it.

That campaign to characterize the dossier as a phony product of Democratic hired guns trying to shame Trump has been unrelenting. And so the dossier has never really been out of the news, most recently as part of the House Republican effort to divert and distract during impeachment hearings. (Then there is Trump lawn ornament William Barr. The attorney general is reportedly privately saying that he disagrees with his own inspector general on one of the key findings in an upcoming report — that the FBI had enough information in July 2016 to justify launching an investigation into members of the Trump campaign.)

Devin Nunes, who led the at times hallucinogenic but desperate effort to defend the indefensible as ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Community, has tried to counter especially incriminating Ukraine scandal testimony by bringing up the dossier, as if to say -- and it's exactly what he was saying -- "yeah, but that Steele dossier. That Steele dossier was part of the plot to keep Trump from being elected in 2016."

The dossier is now very much back in the news because of the timely publication of Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch.

Simpson and Fritsch, former Wall Street Journal investigative reporters and co-founders of the private-investigative firm Fusion GPS, hired former British MI6 spy Christopher Steele to research Trump's ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign, and despite the fact that it's most salacious finding -- the fabled pee tape -- has never surfaced, they affirm that the 17 memos that made up the 35-page dossier were substantially accurate.

"A spy whose sources get it 70 percent right is considered to be one of the best," Simpson and Fritsch write in noting that in his very first report in June, 2016, Steele warned that Russian election meddling was "endorsed by [Vladimir] Putin" and "supported and directed" by him to "sow discord and disunity with the United States itself but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance. . . . Putin wasn't merely seeking to create a crisis of confidence in democratic elections. He was actively pulling strings to destroy Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump."

Although the FBI's investigation into Trump campaign officials commenced in July 2016, it took the U.S. intelligence community as a whole six months to conclude that Putin was helping the upstart Republican candidate, while in September 2019 U.S. officials confirmed that the CIA had a spy deep inside the Kremlin who was providing information confirming Steele's reporting. All of which should effectively debunk the notion that the dossier contains disinformation fed to Steele by Russian intelligence. One official who isn't convinced is Russia expert Fiona Hill, late of the National Security Council, who warned that the dossier was a "rabbit hole" during her testimony before House impeachment investigators.

Many journalists were skeptical of the dossier and some, in my view, downright jealous even if most of them have come around.

Crime in Progress raises yet more questions about Robert Mueller's investigation. While praising Mueller for his documentation of more than 14o contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians and returning 34 indictments, including six in Trump's inner circle, they criticize the special counsel for failing to heed the main lesson of Watergate -- to follow the money.

They note there is no indication in Mueller's final report (the unwhitewashed version) that he looked at Trump's taxes and debts, his curious relationship with Deutsche Bank and long history of financing real estate projects with foreign cash, often of Russian origin, which is precisely where Putin's long suspected leverage in the form of "dirt" on Trump most likely occurred.

Simpson and Fritsch believe that one effect of the dossier has been to trap Trump in an alternate universe.

"To undermine the well-established fact that Russia corrupted the 2016 vote to help him win, Mr. Trump and his allies have tried to build a fiction that pins those crimes on Ukraine," they write in a New York Times op-ed. "In doing so, he has confirmed our darkest fears. The president's bid to solicit foreign help to impugn a domestic political rival in 2019 should wipe away any doubts about his willingness to do the same with Russian help in 2016."

This "balancing act" has been hiding in plain view.

The president's proxies, notably Rudy Giuliani, have sought to tar Joe Biden and son while reinventing what happened in 2016 to switch the blame for the election meddling that Mueller documented from Moscow to Kiev.

Despite the claims of Nunes and other "deep state" conspiracy acolytes, none of Steele's intelligence came from Ukrainian sources. Where Ukraine does come into play is with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who was brought on board the campaign despite -- or more likely because of -- his long history of advising a pro-Moscow Ukrainian president and lobbying for Oleg Deripaska and other mobbed-up Russian oligarchs close to Putin who wanted a piece of the action in Ukraine.

Okay, so Steele mostly got it right.

But given the deeply divisive time in which a monster rules and we struggle, the real impact of his dossier will be as an invaluable document when the definitive histories of Donald Trump as candidate and president are written.

Donald Trump Keeps Winning Despite Losing. What's A Nation Of Laws To Do?

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Sun, 01 Dec 2019 05:00:00 +0000

IMGFLIP.COM

This just in: The noose is tightening around Donald Trump's neck!

That news flash would have been appropriate on virtually any day over the past year as the breathtaking extent of the president's corruption has become known. And that was before the impeachable abuse-of-power cum bribery lollapalooza known as the Ukraine scandal reared its ugly head.

I daresay the noose will continue to tighten, but even with impeachment and a Senate trial looming, there will be no immediate consequence as one conspiracy theory after another is floated by his Republican congressional sycophancy in defense of the Chosen One and lapped up like it was mother's milk in the Fox News echo chamber, the White House stonewall remains substantially unbreached, and Trump's rampage against democracy and decency continues pretty much unchecked.

It is worth noting two important dates in the context of Trump's snarling unrepentedness.

On July 24, Robert Mueller delivered a muted but still powerful condemnation of Russia's interference in the 2016 election with the Trump campaign's willing help, as well as Trump's multiple efforts to obstruct the special counsel's investigation, in an appearance before three congressional committees. On July 25, an obviously unchastened Trump rang up Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to tell him he would have to interfere in the 2020 election by announcing a corruption investigation into Joe Biden and son and play along in acknowledging that it was Ukraine and not Russia who hacked all those Democratic emails in 2016 if he wanted nearly $400 million in desperately needed military aid to fight Russian aggression, let alone a coveted White House visit.

This just in! The noose is tightening around Donald Trump's neck!

Do you feel my frustration? Of course you do when you awaken each day to new revelations that further confirm Trump as the most corrupt president in history, but he dances away -- okay, lumbers away is a better description -- from Democratic congressional subpoenas, court defeats over his tax and accounting records and investigative reporting blockbusters, and continues to lie and cover up, tweet profanities, attack enemies with a special venom reserved for women who cross him, wreak havoc anew, and bellow "absolute immunity!" at every turn.

So Trump the malignant narcissist, for whom the concept of compromise is not a venerable American political tradition but a goblet of curare, keeps having terrible no good very bad weeks. The two weeks in November when Gordon Sondland and Fiona Hill, among others, eviscerated his lame-ass Ukraine scandal defenses are perfect examples, but the upshot was that he got a modest bump in the polls.

This just in! The noose is tightening around Donald Trump's neck.

There seems to be no limit to the ways Trump spins his defense. It's called creative lying.

As ludicrous as the assertion is, he now claims that personal lawyer-fixer Rudy Giuliani was acting independently in Ukraine and was not the go-to guy in the Zelensky extortion scheme.

"So you didn’t direct him to go to Ukraine to do anything or put any heat on them?" the ever obsequious Bill O'Reilly asked.

"No, I didn’t direct him," Trump replied to the Fox News commentator. "But he’s a warrior. Rudy’s a warrior. Rudy went. He possibly saw something.”

Sondland, of course, testified to what was widely understood. Giuliani was the president's proxy and everything had to go through him, while Giuliani publicly and unhesitatedly presented himself as acting on the president's behalf. And Trump told Zelensky in his July 25 call, "I will ask him [Giuliani] to call you along with the attorney general. Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy."

If this particular lie has a familiar ring, it is because Trump used a similar argument in trying to distance himself from Giuliani's predecessor, the now imprisoned Michael Cohen. When it became obvious that Cohen was Trump's bagman in several illicit ventures, he asserted that Cohen was freelancing and wiped his hands of him.

This just in! The noose is tightening around Donald Trump's neck.

Trump keeps winning despite losing, which begs the question of what can be done to get him the hell out of Washington without waiting for his likely defeat in the November 2020 election?

The short answer is to keep doing what we're doing, only more so. As deeply unsatisfying as that answer may seem, keeping on keeping on has merit.

The fast-track march toward drafting articles of impeachment later this month is crucial even if we anticipate an unsatisfactory outcome after a Senate trial.

In the meantime, Trump has been informed by Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, that he has a Friday deadline to inform him whether he intends to mount a defense during the committee’s consideration of impeachment articles, including presenting evidence and calling witnesses. Trump has not replied, but his lawyers have expressed deep skepticism about participating in a process the president has vilified as a "hoax."

The 2020 election may hinge on turnout, so registering to vote and organizing others to do so is hugely important, especially in states where Republican incumbents may be vulnerable. That includes Mitch McConnell.

Finally, we have to keep the faith. That means that we cannot postpone the president's reckoning. We have to keep questioning. We have to keep confronting. And most importantly, we have to keep caring.

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 11:17:00 +0000

MORE HERE.

May Your Thanksgiving Be Wonderful. Even Republicans & Those Trumpkins.

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 12:35:00 +0000

PARODY OF NORMAN ROCKWELL'S "FREEDOM FROM WANT" (1942) / MODERN FAMILY

(PORTIONS OF THIS POST WERE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 2015.)

These are the folks joining us again this Thanksgiving for our annual stuffed turkey, cranberry and brussels sprouts extravaganza.

Before dinner, we all crowd into the living room and listen to Alice's Restaurant for the umpteenth time. Then there's dinner, touch football in the back yard before pumpkin pie and ice cream for dessert, and brandy for the grown-ups while the kids play video games. Then we all watch Home Alone for the ump-umpteenth time before passing the Zantac and going our separate ways.

Despite all the turmoil in the old U.S. of A. and in our own lives, we all have oodles to be thankful for, as our grandson Toby puts it, again this year. I'd like to introduce each of us and explain why.

That's Toby on the left. He had an anxiety disorder that went untreated, and he fell behind in school. Then President Obama signed the Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Act, which provides quality health care to kids like him. Today Toby is a straight-A student. (Well, maybe not in gym class.) But Republicans have consistently opposed renewing CHIP, even for children who are uninsured, and President Trump has agreed.

Next to Toby is Courtney, or Curtsy as her brother Toby calls her. She went to work as a quality control technician at a pharmaceutical plant straight out of high school and eventually found out that she wasn't making as much as the men in her lab. She didn't mind the flirting, at least until her boss's boss grabbed her . . . you know, what the president likes to grab, but getting paid less for doing the same work seemed unfair. Under the Obama administration-supported Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, she's now making the same. But Republicans continue to oppose the act, and President Trump agrees it should be repealed.

Next to Adrian is Matt and next to him is Armand. Matt and Armand are Iraq war veterans who happen to be gay. They have been living together for years and are very much in love, but weren't permitted to get married because of a state law until President Obama's lawyers argued before the Supreme Court that their union is constitutionally protected like Mom's and mine. But Republicans adamantly oppose same-sex marriage and predict a social apocalypse. Never mind that there hasn't been one because Trump's Supreme Court may yet turn back the clock.

Next to Matt and Armand is Kelly. He struggles with a form of paralysis linked to contaminants from a Reagan era Superfund site where he played as a child. Then Obama signed the Reeve Paralysis Act, the first piece of comprehensive legislation aimed at improving the lives of Americans living with paralysis and backed embryonic stem-cell research into the causes of paralysis. But Republicans didn't want to fund the act and continue to oppose anything to do with embryonic stem cells. President Trump agrees.

That's Mom and me at the head of the table. I'll get back to us in just a sec.

Next to us is Adnan. He was an orphaned refugee from the civil war in Syria when Barbara and Frank adopted him last year. They were unable to find child care while they worked. Under an Obama administration program, money was provided for child care and his English teacher's job was saved through the president's Recovery Act. But Republicans oppose the program and Recovery Act, and oppose even orphaned war refugees being granted asylum. You can guess where President Trump stands.

Next to Bart is Beverly, or The Bevster as her brother Toby calls her. She's asthmatic but couldn't afford health insurance when she decided to work for a veterinarian for a year before attending community college to become a vet tech, but because of the Affordable Care Act she can stay on her mom's policy until she's out on her own. But Republicans oppose all forms of health-care reform. You can guess where President Trump stands.

Next to Beverly is her and her siblings' mom, Barbara. President Obama's stimulus bill saved her job at the auto assembly plant and she is celebrating a big pay raise because of record sales and profits. (You may have noticed that she's wearing a new wig, which is the subject of some dinner-table tittering). But most Republicans opposed bailing out automakers, while you can expect President Trump to eventually deport all those small Fords back to where they were manufactured -- in Mexico.

And finally there's Barbara's husband, Frank. He likes to joke that he's the Frank in Dodd-Frank, the financial reform legislation supported by President Obama, and there's actually some truth to that. The agency created as part of Dodd-Frank to protect Americans against predatory lending saved their house from being taken when they couldn't keep up with usurious mortgage payments. But Republicans oppose any Wall Street regulation, and President Trump is more than happy to oblige.

As for Mom and me, we too thank President Obama, warts and all, and have done so every year when we say Grace.

We know President Obama wasn't perfect, but we sure feel like middle class folks like us finally had a chance again. And what the heck are conservatives talking about when they claim liberals are trying to destroy the American family? It's conservatives, gosh darn it, and of course President Trump, because of their tax giveaways for the rich and corporations and opposition to health-care reform and food stamps. Heck, even people who love assault weapons sometimes nee food stamps. Sorry!

The only person missing is our next-door neighbor Leo, who usually sat at the opposite end of the table from Mom and I.

Leo is a widower, poor guy, and lost his wife to cancer in 2008. It had gone untreated because their darned insurance company refused to write a policy when they found out she was ill. Leo would never blame the Republicans for that, although his wife once told Mom they were to blame. Anyhow, Leo said he wouldn't be joining us for Thanksgiving dinner because that darned Toby hurt his feelings. He asked Leo if he was a racist at the Labor Day picnic because he was wearing a red Make America Great Again baseball cap, flies a Confederate battle flag in his yard and has a Trump sticker on the rifle rack in the back window of his pickup truck. Toby caught Leo trying to scrape off the Trump sticker the other day, but he's too proud to admit he was wrong.

You can't choose your family, of course. Or your president, as it turns out. But we've been blessed, and hope your Thanksgiving will be as wonderful as ours. Uncle Frank likes to say that we "mustn't view everything through an ideological prison," so yes, our blessings even go out to the Republicans, Leo and his Trumpkin buddies, and even our . . . uh, president. Even if the whole bunch of them are against everything we value and stand for.

Trump Upends The Military Justice System To Coddle A War Criminal. Surprised?

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 15:57:00 +0000

MAURICIO LIMA / AFP-GETTY IMAGES

We certainly do not need yet another reminder about what an abominable commander in chief Donald Trump has been for our nation's men and women at arms. It is but a part of his inherent cruelty and incapacity to show compassion, let alone defer to anyone who might know better than him, in this case the all-important military chain of command. In fact, this beast who golfed his way through the Vietnam war because of a phoneyed -up deferment for bone spurs could care less about the armed forces unless he can turn them to his own selfish ends. So it is with the saga of Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, a war criminal whom the president has embraced because the Navy SEAL has become a cause célèbre of conservative commentators.

What is different this time is that Navy Secretary Richard Spencer and Rear Admiral Collin Green, who commands the SEALs, threatened to resign or be fired if their plans to expel Gallagher from the elite unit were blocked by Trump, who countermanded an order to demote Gallagher and pardoned two other men convicted of war crimes.

But in a typical twist in the cruel soap opera known as the Trump presidency, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a Trump flunkey who understands his major responsibility is coddling an impetuous boss and not protecting the military, something that his predecessor Jim Mattis would not do, demanded that Spencer resign after Trump ordered the Pentagon to lay off Gallagher.

That admission came on Monday after Esper had initially said the reason Spencer had to go was that his private statements about Gallagher's case differed from what he was advocating in public. Beyond lame, but what matters here is that Esper capitulated to Trump, who was outraged by Spencer's threat to quit, rather than defend his Navy secretary.

In a parting shot at Trump, Spencer wrote in his "resignation" letter that he regarded good order and discipline throughout the Navy's ranks to be "deadly serious business."

"The lives of our sailors, Marines and civilian teammates quite literally depend on the professional execution of our many missions, and they also depend on the ongoing faith and support of the people we serve and the allies we serve alongside," he added. "Unfortunately, it has become apparent that in this respect, I no longer share the same understanding with the commander in chief who appointed me, in regards to the key principle of good order and discipline. I cannot in good conscience obey an order that I believe violates the sacred oath I took."

Before we get too deep into this latest outrage, it must be emphasized that fighting in any war, especially contemporary wars where the rules of engagement can be maddenly and lethally unclear, is almost impossible for chairbound civilians to comprehend, but that is why there is a military justice system to weed out offenders and punish them.

It must also be emphasized that the horrors of war, including the nightmarish effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, can barely be understood by those who have not been there and done that. The only reasons I claim to have some understanding is that I have written about PTSD as a journalist and have had several friends who suffered badly from PTSD, including one who died just the other day and had never escaped the hallucinatory nightmare of operating behind enemy lines as an artillery forward observation officer at the height of the Vietnam war.

Trump, for whom the rule of law and codes of conduct are seen as a bothersome obstacles and not pillars of our democracy, had angered military leaders by intervening in the cases of Gallagher and two other service members accused of war crimes.

On November 15, over objections from the Pentagon, Trump reversed the demotion of Gallagher and pardoned the two other service members, overruling military leaders who sought to punish the three and siding with conservative commentators who portrayed them as war heroes unfairly prosecuted for actions taken in the heat of battle.

Gallagher was turned in by his own platoon last spring.

Several fellow SEALs reported that he had shot civilians and killed a captive teenage Islamic State fighter with a custom hunting knife during a deployment in Iraq in 2017. He was also charged with obstruction of justice for threatening to kill the SEALs who reported him.

Heroic, eh?

At trial, Gallagher was acquitted of all charges, including murder, while being found guilty of bringing discredit to the armed forces by posing for photos with the teenage captive's dead body. He was demoted, and since then has trashed-talked his way through interviews on Fox News in which he blames everyone from his commanders to his fellow SEALs for his notoriety. But not himself.

Trump, playing to his base while poking the military justice system in the eye, was outraged. He tweeted that "the Navy will NOT be taking away Warfighter and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher's Trident Pin. This case was handled very badly from the beginning. Get back to business!"

Gallagher will now keep his Trident pin, the symbol of his membership in the SEALs, at Esper's direction because of "concerns" that the events of the past few days would make it impossible for him to get an impartial hearing, according to a Defense Department spokesman.

As if the case didn't already stink on ice, Trump almost certainly was further moved to exculpate Gallagher because his legal team includes two Trump friends who are former partners of presidential lawyer-fixer Giuliani: Bernard Kerik, a former (and disgraced) New York police commissioner, and Marc Mukasey, whose father, Michael, was an atrocious attorney general for George W, Bush and currently represents Trump as an outside counsel.

Trump, it should go without saying, has repeatedly dishonored the military.

He sent troops to the southern border to try to win votes before the 2018 midterms, then stole money earmarked for the military to build his damned wall. There is the humiliating retreat from northern Syria (since reversed), his callous treatment of the widow of Army Sergeant La David T. Johnson and, in the fallout from that incident, the claim that President Obama had never called former Marine General John Kelly, who by then was his chief of staff, after the battlefield death of his son, Lieutenant Robert Kelly in Afghanistan. That was true, but Kelly and his wife were invited to the White House by the Obamas where they offered their condolences.

Americans always have been able to put aside their differences and prejudices when it comes to mourning and honoring our sons and daughters at arms when they fall defending the freedoms Trump would take away. He has sought not to honor, but to exploit and disparage.

Beyond Gallagher, the biggest criminal here is Trump, who already has done so much to undermine the nation's moral compass. And yes, there remains a semblance of one, look no further than House impeachment proceedings. Insofar as the military and human rights, this should come as no surprise as Trump advocated the use of torture and mass executions during the 2016 campaign.

Maintaining discipline is paramount for the SEALs and other elite units. SEAL peer-review panels alone reportedly have removed more than 150 Trident pins since 2011.

Trump is supporting men who committed well-documented war crimes because of the perversely misguided view that to do otherwise would sap them of their confidence to fight. "We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!" he said in another government-by-tweet moment.

There was, of course, not a peep from Trump's Republican congressional sycophancy, some of whom actually served in the military, as opposed to a commander in chief who is a chickenhawk.

Trump's perverse logic, predicated on the view that he alone is morally superior, actually endangers soldiers because it emboldens enemies and further undermines the confidence of America's erstwhile allies.

If Character Is Destiny, Then America Was Bound To Find Itself At This Crossroad

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Sun, 24 Nov 2019 12:10:00 +0000

SAMUEL CORUM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Whether Donald Trump goes bye-bye after an impeachment trial in the Senate, which remains extremely unlikely, or after the 2020 election, which is extremely likely, we can credit an individual the president called "a really good man and a great American," who then proceeded to blow the doors off the White House.

Looking back on two weeks of marathon public testimony before House impeachment investigators there may never have been a public figure who was so bad but did so much good as Gordon Sondland.

This bullet-headed naïf bought the EU ambassadorship, for which he was utterly unprepared, with a $1 million contribution to Trump's inaugural festivities. Sondland may have been the last guy in the room to get a joke -- Hey, Burisma is code for Biden, Gordy -- but he was in the right rooms at the right times and pounded the last nail in Trump's coffin in confirming that in a stunning abuse of power, the president of the United States was directing a rogue operation to extort dirt on a 2020 opponent from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in return for nearly $400 million in desperately needed military aid to fight Trump's favorite despot and a coveted visit to the Oval Office.

"We followed the president's orders," Sondland said in dismantling one of the top talking points incessantly flogged by Trump's apologistas. "Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret."

If character is destiny, then America was bound to find itself at this crossroad as the third year of the most corrupt and evil presidency in history tweets to a conclusion.

Even Trump's Republican congressional sycophants, in their pathetically flailing efforts to defend the indefensible, understand that he is deeply damaged goods, but they'll stick with him until the bitter end. To do otherwise would be to invite revenge, be it primary election challenges next spring or more subtle reprisals.

Still, there is much to feel good about amidst so much awfulness.

Sondland could have taken the Fifth. The career publics servants (Trump sneeringly calls them "bureaucrats") who preceded and followed him could have obeyed the president's orders to not comply with congressional subpoenas but believed the country they quietly and patriotically serve is much more important than knuckling under to a mob boss and instead delivered withering rebukes.

"I believe that those who have information that the Congress deems relevant have a legal and a moral obligation to provide it," said Fiona Hill, who like all of the officials who spoke testified under oath. While all of the officials who Republicans tried to lead us to believe would exonerate the president refused to testify. (Memo to Mike Pompeo: Your political career is over.)

Adam Schiff and his fellow Democrats conducted impeachment hearings with a gravitas befitting so serious a process, their dignity and seriousness of purpose juxtaposed by the absurd arguments of Trump's defenders. And they nailed Trump in only a few weeks, while it took Robert Mueller two years to produce a big something or other.

Many Americans were paying attention. No matter where you went, you could not escape images of the hearings flickering on televisions. How many viewers came away newly convinced of Trump's unfitness for office and will vote for the Democratic presidential nominee no matter who she is?

And the wannabe Democratic nominees, debating just hours after Sondland's star turn, put aside their internecine bickering and let Trump have it with both barrels. Senator Amy Klobuchar, in a subtle nod to Hill and Marie Yovanovich, scoffed at the notion that a woman can't beat Trump, saying "Nancy Pelosi does it every single day."

SAMUEL CORUM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

But back to the awful stuff.

Trump is still president even if the drip-drip-drip of disclosures are deeply incriminating.

As in Russia being involved in a yearslong campaign to blame Ukraine for its own 2016 election interference, which plays astutely into one of the more outrageous defenses propagated by Representative Devin Nunes and other right-wing conspiracy theory freaks. As in Nunes secretly meeting with indicted Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas in Vienna to dig up dirt on the Bidens. As in Giuliani, who as the president's personal lawyer-fixer ran the extortion scheme on the ground in Washington and Kiev, now being the subject of three federal investigations.

Brett Stephens, a conservative New York Times columnist, opposed impeachment two months ago but is now all in for removing the president.

He concludes that for all the talk of corruption in Ukraine, because of Trump we've been living in a country undergoing "its own dismal process" of Ukrainianization:

[O]f treating fictions as facts; and propaganda as journalism; and political opponents as criminals; and political offices as business ventures; and personal relatives as diplomatic representatives; and legal fixers as shadow cabinet members; and extortion as foreign policy; and toadyism as patriotism; and fellow citizens as 'human scum'; and mortal enemies as long-lost friends -- and then acting as if all this is perfectly normal. This is more than a high crime. It's a clear and present danger to our security, institutions, and moral hygiene.
Trump's criminality notwithstanding, it is possible that not one oath-violating Republican, pretty much all of whom have become not just accomplices but Russian stooges in their cult-like fealty to the Chosen One, will vote to convict him after a circus-like Senate trial at which Joe and Hunter Biden could be called as defense witnesses. And make no mistake, America, the biggest beneficiary of the legislative and domestic dysfunction that Trump has sown is his favorite autocrat -- Vladimir Putin.

So if Trump's defenders can't be shamed into accepting what the impeachment hearings have revealed and continue to buy into what Hill called "politically driven falsehoods," perhaps it's time to drop any pretense of winning them over.

This has prompted Greg Sargent at The Washington Post to propose that Democrats begin treating the president's defenders as criminal accomplices who are actively engaged in keeping the president's corruption from getting fully uncovered, let alone judged fairly as jurors at a Senate trial.

A great if ultimately impractical idea, but there even is a silver lining here as well. That is because in November 2020 Trump will be taking down with him many a Republican who couldn't be shamed but can be defeated, marking the beginning of the end of our long national nightmare.

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 12:35:00 +0000

MORE HERE.

Evidence-Free Flapdoodle: Or Why The GOP's Trump Defense Is Imploding

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 19:35:00 +0000

SHAWN THEW / GETTY IMAGES

Devin Nunes is the face of the Republican pushback against President Trump's impeachment, and beyond his sour puss lies the reason they are flailing and failing: Defending the indefensible is impossible given the enormity of the Ukraine scandal evidence presented by career diplomats and White House insiders, leaving Nunes to traffic in his pet conspiracy theories, chief among them that Ukraine and not Russia hacked the damaging Democratic emails that helped tip the 2016 election to Trump.

Nunes, an eight-term congressman from California's San Joaquin Valley, was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee until the Blue Wave midterm election victories bumped him down to ranking minority member.

"I guess they fantasize about this at night," Nunes said of what he called Democrats' "Watergate fantasies" shortly before Gordon Sondland blew another door off the White House on Wednesday in throwing Mick Mulvaney, Mike Pompeo, Rick Perry and Mike Pence under the bus.

Or "underbusing," as one pundit put it.

Nunes has long promoted the fantastic notion that a "deep state" plot was engineered by former FBI Director James Comey and Hillary Clinton acolytes to deny Trump the Oval Office. And lest we forget, he was the chief advocate of the discredited notion that President Obama had ordered the phones in Trump Tower to be bugged.

By Nunes' own admission, he had been secretly admitted to the White House grounds where in an Inspector Clouseau-esque caper he met secretly under the cover of darkness with a "source," who turn out to be three Trump staffers with national security credentials, who showed him a secret report that U.S. spies, in the course of doing their secret jobs, may have incidentally -- but wrongly, of course -- swept up Trump.

Nunes eventually recused himself from the Republican-controlled Intel Committee's foundering Russia scandal investigation, which was to conclude with no Democratic input that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow, except that he really didn't recuse himself and continued to direct the committee sub rosa while running a clandestine parallel probe of his own.

Meanwhile, it was reported this week that Lev Parnas, an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani, helped Nunes in that parallel probe by setting up meetings in Europe in 2018 where Nunes unsuccessfully tried to shake loose intelligence that would undermine Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia scandal investigation.

No matter, because desperate Republicans are in the process of throwing Giuliani under that proverbial bus by blaming him for the extortionate Ukraine dirt-for-military aid plot.

While Nunes' evidence-free flapdoodle like blaming Ukraine for the Russian hacks has been embraced by much of the Fox News commentariat and is gospel to Trump's base, wingnuttery is a lousy substitute for reality when someone with the gravitas of Fiona Hill, Trump's former top Russia expert, tells House impeachment investigators under oath that Nunes' fever dream, so avidly pushed by Trump, is a "fictional narrative."

"The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions," she said to Nunes' sour puss on Thursday as the second and final week of public testimony came to a conclusion.

"It is beyond dispute," said Hill, who has written an authoritative book on Vladimir Putin and noted that the GOP fictions on Ukraine help Moscow, which she said is gearing up to repeat its interference in 2020. Nunes, a useful idiot for Putin in addition to Trump, was not moved.

"All of us who came here under a legal obligation also felt we had a moral obligation to do so. We came here as fact witnesses," she added. "I know this has put a huge cloud over this presidency and over our whole democratic system . . . that's why, as a nonpartisan person, an expert on Russia, I wanted to try to see if I could help." Nunes still was not moved.

Which raises up an important point: All the officials whose public testimony has been so damaging to Trump have given that testimony under oath. And all of those officials who Republicans are trying to lead us to believe would exonerate the president have so far refused to testify.

Do I detect a pattern here?

As if that weren't bad enough for Trump's congressional sycophancy, the list of administration insiders willing to disobey the president and testify under oath has grown longer. Oh, but the president says he's willing to testify. Just like he was willing to testify in Mueller's investigation, which he of course never did despite repeated assertions that he would.

Do I detect another pattern here?

Trump, ever presidential, tweeted prior to Hill's testimony that Democrats were "human scum," while Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, in a nod to Nunes, declared the Democrats "are clearly being motivated by a sick hatred for President Trump and their rabid desire to overturn the 2016 election."

Little noticed as the Republican desperately sought new rabbit holes to go down, former independent counsel Ken Starr, whose prosecutorial excesses resulted in the Bill Clinton impeachment circus, said on Fox News that things looked so bad for the president that Republican leaders should consider going to the White House to ask for Trump's resignation.

That, of course, is what finally convinced Richard Nixon to quit.

More than 45 years separate Watergate and the Ukraine scandal, not to mention all of Trump's other crimes. The Republican Party of 1973 was law abiding, and most Republicans reflexively defended Nixon as the Watergate scandal grew and the attendant constitutional crisis deepened. And they stuck with him even after Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy AG William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carry out his order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, the Mueller of those turbulent times.

But three Republicans -- Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, House Minority Leader John Rhodes and Senator Barry Goldwater -- had the guts to go to the White House and tell Nixon he had lost the support of the country and he soon resigned.

Can you imagine Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and Charles Grassley doing that after Sondland's John Dean moment and as one Republican defense after another has been torched?

How about Devin Nunes?

Sondland Hammers In The Last Nail In Trump's Coffin, But Hold The Bubbly

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 18:03:00 +0000

DOUG MILLS/ THE NEW YORK TIMES

One by one the officials, notably including those called by Republicans as they flail and splutter in trying to save Donald Trump, have approached the witness table in the ornate made-for-television committee room in the Longworth Office Building across Independence Avenue from the Capitol to be sworn in. And one by one they have methodically blown the doors off the White House in the second week of explosive public impeachment hearings that by all rights should be the beginning of the end of Trump's presidency. But we are bitterly aware of the perils of irrational exuberance in these perilous times, so let's keep the champagne on ice a while longer.

The show-stopping moment -- a John Dean moment, if you will -- came Wednesday morning during Gordon Sondland's stunning testimony detailing the scheme to extort Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden and son before nearly $400 million in desperately needed military aid to fight Russian aggression was released.

"I know that members of this committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a quid pro quo?" Sondland said with the clarity of a man who bought his EU ambassadorship for a $1 million contribution to Trump's inaugural events but has now decided that going to prison for perjury is not worth his continuing allegiance to the Chosen One.

"The answer is yes."

Sondland, in hammering the last nail into Trump's coffin, directly connected him to the scheme, testifying that the president had personally ordered that the aid and a coveted White House meeting for Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky be put on ice, and for good measure dragged in Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Vice President Mike Pence as being players in the extortion campaign.

Then there is the omnipresent Rudy Giuliani, who Sondland further confirmed not only orchestrated the scheme, but that he and others "followed the president's orders" to talk to Trump's oleaginous lawyer-fixer about anything to do with putting the heat on Zelensky. There was not a "back channel" on Ukraine policy, he said, there was only one channel.

"We followed the president's orders. Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret," Sondland said.

The Democrats' star witness then marched on, further undermining the ridiculous idea pushed by Republicans that Trump truly cared about corruption in Ukraine, testifying that there never was a desire for investigations -- just announcements of them.

"I never heard anyone say that the investigations had to start, or had to be completed," Sondland said. "The only thing I heard from Mr. Giuliani or otherwise, was that they had to be announced [publicly] in some form and that form kept changing."

Inconsistencies remained between Sondland's lengthy testimony on Wednesday and on October 17 when he repeatedly said he could not recall if there was a quid pro quo.

Republicans hammered on these inconsistencies in trying to undercut Sondland's credibility and portray him as a rogue actor and Trump as an innocent, while a House Republican staff lawyer made the opening move in an effort to pin the Ukraine pressure campaign solely on Giuliani.

Republicans clearly were stunned by Sondland's opening remarks implicating Trump.

Devin Nunes, ranking House Intelligence Committee Republican and custodian of the most outrageous of the right-wing "deep state" conspiracy theories, was so surprised he failed to alter his prepared testimony in which he treated Sondland as a friendly witness.

"You are here today to be smeared," he said, even after Sondland had distributed his opening remarks.

Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who has kept a tight rein on the hearings, thus far keeping them from devolving into the Republican circus some had feared, called Sondland's testimony "among the most significant evidence to date. . . . It goes right to the heart of the issue of bribery, as well as other potential high crimes and misdemeanors."

Schiff, rebutting the claims of Trump's Republican defenders, who sought to wear down Sondland during a long afternoon of questioning, said “My colleagues seem to be under the impression that unless the president spoke the words, 'Ambassador Sondland, I am bribing the Ukrainian president,' that there is no evidence of bribery. If he didn’t say, 'Ambassador Sondland, I'm telling you, I'm not going to give the aid unless they do this,' that there's no evidence of a quid pro quo on military aid."

"They got caught," Schiff added. "They got caught."

In brief remarks to reporters outside the White House, Trump predictably sought to distance himself from Sondland, saying, "This is not a man I know well," a walkback from having previously called him "highly respected . . . a great American."

We should be elated that one of Trump's top henchmen has turned on him in giving such incredibly damning testimony. Sondland all but assured that the House will approve articles of impeachment, possibly including bribery and obstruction of justice in addition to abuse of power and contempt of Congress.

But there still is no indication that Senate Republicans will be moved to convict the hands-down most corrupt president in history despite growing public approval for his removal, so hold the bubbly.

Oh, Rudy: A Sleazebag's Fate Is Linked To The Biggest Sleazebag Of 'Em All

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 12:42:00 +0000

ELISE AMENDOLA / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Now Ukraine is investigating Hillary campaign and DNC conspiracy with foreign operatives including Ukrainian and others to affect 2016 election. And there's no [FBI Director James] Comey to fix the result. ~ RUDY GIULIANI tweet, April 23, 2019

After growing accustomed to Rudy Giuliani's syphilitic-brained pronouncements, we haven't heard much from him lately. That may have something to do with the fact Donald Trump's personal lawyer and fixer set out to defend the president against the possibility of impeachment and instead helped create the basis for impeachment -- the Ukraine scandal -- all the while hanging out with incredibly sleazy people and doing some self-dealing of his own that have led to three federal investigations against him.

This is but one of the more delicious ironies of the beleaguered Trump's fight to remain in office. Here are two more as a second week of televised impeachment hearings gets underway and support for removing Trump from offices clicks upward:

The Russians know far more about what Giuliani has been up to than do House investigators. Despite claiming to sell cybersecurity advice, he has run Trump's shadow Ukraine policy using open cellphone lines and communications apps that Moscow routinely monitors.

Even though Trump instructed officials to speak directly to Giuliani about anything relating to that shadow policy, Republicans are prepared to throw him under the bus by claiming that he, Mick Mulvaney and others were freelancing without the president's knowledge.

The federal investigations targeting Giuliani concern potential campaign-finance violations and failure to register as a foreign agent, a counterintelligence probe involving his Ukraine business dealings and a criminal investigation into his business relationship with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who helped him to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and son and lit the fire under the sacking of Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovich.

Parnas and Fruman, who were arrested as they were about to board a flight for Kiev, where they may have planned to meet Giuliani, have been charged with conspiracy, falsification of records, and lying to the Federal Election Commission about their political donations. Parnas is cooperating with the feds.

Trump, who makes a big deal over hiring "the best and most serious people," has had a lot of lousy lawyers, but Giuliani may be the worst, if only for his proclivity to say extraordinarily dumb things like "Truth isn't truth," which he infamously uttered when confronted with Trump's Russia scandal misdeeds on "Meet the Press."

Or explaining that because Trump doesn't believe he obstructed justice, he can plausibly deny obstructing justice.

Or when he said there is no such crime called "collusion," which as has been pointed out is kind of like saying that if you walked into an Apple Store, stuffed an iPhone in your pants and walked out, you're innocent because the criminal code makes no specific reference to "stuffing an iPhone in your pants."

Or like not needing his own lawyers, a comment he made the other day shortly before he hired his own lawyers.

Politics always has been populated by sleazebags, but every generation or so someone like Giuliani comes along who is so vile that he stands out from the pack, which is really saying something considering the lowlifes, con artists and grifters that have long orbited Trump.

The president hired Giuliani to be his personal lawyer in April 2018, ostensibly to help extricate him from the Russia scandal, which has come back to bite Trump in his capacious ass as impeachment investigators look into whether he lied to Robert Mueller. (You think?)

There likely is a second reason Giuliani was hired: In 2017, Trump had begun floating the discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine and not Russia hacked Democratic emails in 2016. Giuliani already had established contacts with malleable Ukrainian officials who were eager to work with him, and he was to begin laying the groundwork for the military aid-for-Bidens dirt extortion plot in December 2018.

The stories of Giuliani's sleazyness are legion, and that is quite an accomplishment since he came into most of our lives on the highest of notes as "America's Mayor," who took charge after the 9/11 disaster.

But from there it has been all downhill.

Giuliani liked to brag that as mayor of New York City, he spent more time at Ground Zero than rescue and clean-up workers, which is false and a lie akin to Trump's claim that he spent a lot of time at Ground Zero and was involved in the cleanup. (In reality, he made a brief appearance a week after the attacks and played no part in the cleanup.)

Actually, Giuliani's administration had failed to address the flaws in the response to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, which came back in spades on 9/11, and he knowingly sent workers into the toxic hell of the collapsed Twin Towers.

Then there are Giuliani's ample personal shortcomings, including being a serial adulterer who broke the news to his second wife that he was getting a divorce during a televised press conference and is now being sued by his third and current wife for a gadzillion bucks because of another affair.

Had Giuliani been nominated by the Family Values Party aka Republicans and then elected president in 2008, his pal Bernard Kerik would have missed his inauguration.

This is because the former NYC corrections chief, promoted to police commissioner by Giuliani, was doing prison time for just one of his multiple legal entanglements, which included glomming onto $165,000 in free renovations to his Bronx apartment by a construction company with mob ties, shacking up with his mistress in a Manhattan condo reserved for cops with post-9/11 traumas, and that timeless toe stubber, failing to pay taxes on an illegal immigrant nanny whom he was boinking on the side.

None of this had prevented Giuliani from drawing on his vast reservoirs of good judgment and recommending that Kerik become Dubya's first homeland security czar. Dubya wisely demurred.

Giuliani has been a gold medalist in flip-flopping.

He was for gay rights before he was against them. He was for gun control before he hearted the National Rifle Association. He was for forgiving illegal immigrants eking out honest livings in the Big Apple until he wanted to deport them. He was once a hawk on Iran, but then became a dove before reverting to being a hawk.

Giuliani flailed at becoming the GOP presidential nominee again in 2012 and yet again last year, and was on the A-list to become Trump's secretary of state because of being such a big help to him during the 2016 campaign.

This included bragging on a right-wing radio show on October 26, less than two weeks before the election, that he was in contact with FBI agents and had "a surprise or two that you're going to hear about in the next few days" regarding Lock Her Up Hillary's emails.

FBI Director James Comey's hand was then forced, and in an effort to get out ahead of a story that was now certain to be leaked by Republicans, he informed several congressional committees by letter on October 28 of a non-existent development in the Clinton email investigation that, coupled with Russia-Trump . . . uh, collusion, essentially doomed her.

After the election, Giuliani helpfully bragged that he had advised the newbie president about how to impose his patently illegal Muslim ban "legally." But it turned out his conflicts of interest were too enormous even for Trump and the top job at State went to Rex Tillerson.

And now, a year and a half and after Giuliani was brought on board -- 18 months of missteps, outrageous statements and outright lies, including the whopper that he knew nothing about the very extortion attempt he helped engineer -- the fate of this sleazebag is linked to the the biggest sleazebag of them all.

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 20:29:00 +0000

MORE HERE.

Trump Is Now Running From The Founders & Constitution, As Well As The Law

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 20:28:00 +0000

DAVID NAKAMURA / THE WASHINGTON POST

It has been two months since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that Democrats were initiating impeachment proceedings against President Trump. It has been a week since the proceedings shifted into overdrive with public hearings. And while you will vehemently disagree if you are trapped in the Fox News echo chamber or rely on Breitbart to reassure you that the earth is flat, the big takeaways are that not only has the public backlash nervous Democrats feared not occurred, but support for impeachment is growing.

While the hearings are being spoofed as a sort of Jetsons Meet the Flintstones for the Resistance and MAGA crowds by lazy pundits, I happen to believe that more and more people are realizing their country has been taken from them by the monster in the White House and they want it back, dammit.

The searing indictment of the monster that House Democrats are presenting through the anguished testimony of nonpartisan career diplomats and others disobeying Trump's orders to not cooperate in their Ukraine scandal probe is helped considerably by the Republican inability to defend the indefensible while never once invoking the Constitution they took an oath to obey.

Charles Pierce, in noting that Trump is now running from not just the law but the Founders and that Constitution, as well, offers these timely words of wisdom at Esquire:

The reluctance of the political order to accept impeachment as a viable part of the Constitution largely felt as though the danger was not to the executive branch, but to the comfortable illusions that Americans had developed over the years regarding their form of government. One of the great conundrums in the American political mind is that a prideful boasting about the Constitution is always accompanied by mournful concern for its fragility. Don't let the Constitution run at full ops or it will break down and there will be gears and wires all over the highway.

It is positively comical to watch the president and his advocates seek to wrap themselves in these old illusions. They are the subtext of the entire defense because, on the facts of the case, the president is dead-bang impeachable.

The president, grimly familiar as we have become with his narcissistic self-pitying, vulgar tweetstorms, rampant self-dealing and corruption and never ending torrent of lies, is of course the biggest enemy of the flailing Republican efforts to keep his dam from bursting.

As it is, the drip-drip-drip from the dam is increasing as impeachment proceedings accelerate and referenda on Trump in off-off year elections in Pennsylvania, Virginia and now deep-red Louisiana send the message that he cannot win a second term in an honestly contested election.

In an impeachment highlight reel moment, sacked Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovich told rapt investigators on Friday that she received the first ominous phone call about her ouster while honoring Ukrainian anti-corruption activist Kateryna Handzyuk. Republicans, who sensed that they needed to treat Yovanovich with kid gloves, alternately sat on their hands or praised her for all her difficult assignments in global hotspots as she described the Trump-fueled "smear campaign" that effectively ended her distinguished 30-year career.

(Handzyuk died on November 4 after enduring 11 operations from the burns caused by the sulphuric acid an angry attacker threw on her. She had continued to fight corruption from her hospital bed.)

But Trump, who claimed he wasn't watching the hearings, was unable to keep it zipped and lashed out as Yovanovich was testifying, tweeting that she was a bad actor. Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff stopped the proceedings, read the tweet aloud and hinted that witness intimidation, long a Trump weapon of choice, might be added to the articles of impeachment to be drawn up against him, presumably abuse of power and contempt of Congress, for openers.

As only the fourth impeachment inquiry in American history plays out, the next act in the drama may well star the perjurious Gordon Sondland, who is one of eight administration officials scheduled to testify this week.

Sondland helped Trump smear diplomats like William Taylor, George Kent and Yovanovich in establishing a shadow State Department to bribe Ukraine and boost his chances in the 2020 election by getting the president of the nascent democracy to smear Joe Biden and son and back the right-wing claim that Ukraine and not Russia hacked Democratic emails in 2016.

Sondland, as we now know, called Trump on an unsecured phone from a busy Kiev restaurant the day after the president's infamous shakedown call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and told him Zelensky was ready to move forward with "the investigations." (Wink wink, nod nod). After Sondland hung up, a staff member asked him what Trump had to say about Ukraine, to which Sondland replied, "Trump cares more about the investigations of Biden."

Sondland bought an ambassadorship for a $1 million donation to Trump's inaugural events, and now must decide between loyalty to the Chosen One or joining other insiders like Paul Manafort, and Michael Cohen, who are in prison, and now Roger Stone, who is headed there.

It may take a while, but my guess is that Gordy will crack, the Founders will smile, the Constitution will survive and Trump will slouch ever closer to the end of his reign.

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 13:34:00 +0000

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN FEBRUARY 2019)

MORE HERE.

Outrage Fatigue Is Donald Trump's Greatest Weapon Against Impeachment

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 18:14:00 +0000

MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/ THE WASHINGTON POST

It was August 2016. Newly coronated Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had just pivoted from calling John McCain a coward for being shot down over North Vietnam to characterizing Khizr Khan as a simpering Hillary Clinton puppet, Khan's wife Ghazala as an obeisantly silent slave and their son, Humayan, who sacrificed his life to a suicide bomber on an Iraqi roadside to save his comrades, as a needless casualty of a war that would never have been fought had he been president. The full extent of the horrors the reality television star and faux billionaire was capable of unleashing if he improbably was elected still were only an abstraction, but I warned for the first and not last time against taking Trump's demagoguery for granted.

Little even did I know, and a kind of outrage fatigue has taken hold in the intervening three-plus years. That fatigue has now become perhaps the most effective weapon of the beleaguered president and his congressional Republican sycophancy amidst impeachment hearings that further reveal him to be everything we had feared and more.

One fatigued media outlet called the momentous public testimony this week detailing Trump's attempted extortion of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig nonexistent dirt on father and son Biden a "big yawn," another "more like the dress rehearsal for a serious one-act play than the opening night of a hit Broadway musical," another "consequential but dull," while yet another grouched that "fireworks and explosive moments were scarce."

As if describing Trump's blatant self dealing in scrupulous detail should be some kind of Netflix series.

But it was the really fatigued Chris Cillizza of CNN who took the booby prize for saying that the witnesses who were methodically depantsing the president, including William Taylor, George Kent and Maria Yovanovich, "lacked the pizzazz necessary to capture public attention."

Okay, so the media flunks yet another test of how to cover Trump by stooping to the role of reality television show critics. This is an especially grave failure because these examples singing Trump's tune are music to the ears of the president and his defenders.

In the course of that pizzazz-deficient week of testimony, Trump immigration point man Stephen Miller was revealed to be the white supremacist we've long suspected him of being, Trump welcomed fellow tyrant Recep Tayyip Erdogan into the Oval Office where they had a chuckle about Turkish atrocities against the Kurds trapped in northern Syria after Trump had abandoned him, and there was yet another round of environmental protection rollbacks.

None produced barely a blip on the media's radar, and you had to dig really deep to find mention of a smug Erdogan making a big deal of returning Trump's fatuous October 9 letter to him after he withdrew U.S. troops from northern Syria in which he warned, "Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool. I will call you later."

And so Erdogan, like Kim Jong-un of Korea, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Xi Jinping of China and, of course, Vladimir Putin of Russia, played the president for the fool he is.

But the week was not without at least some pizzazz.

Sean Spicer put on a bravura swan song performance in tangoing into the sunset on "Dancing With the Stars."

Trump provided the zing Yovanovich may have lacked by attacking her while she testified in a slam-dunk case of witness intimidation.

Oh, and Roger Stone, Republican dirty trickster and longest of Trump's longtime advisers, was found guilty of lying to Congress and tampering with a witness concerning his involvement in WikiLeaks' release of Russian-hacked Democratic emails in the 2016 election. Stone will likely join former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen in doing prison time, but it should be noted that none of the three were charged with being directly involved in the Trump campaign's collusion with Putin's cyberwarriors to throw the election.

Nor has any other American as Trump has skated in what arguably is the crime of the century. (All of that noted, the Stone conviction is a big win for Robert Mueller, whom I took apart just the other day.)

Whether congressional Republicans can play us like fools through their divert-and-distract impeachment hearing maneuvering will go far in determining whether the president's abuses of power stand and reveal the once vaunted but now battered American system of justice incapable of holding accountable a monster like Trump.

We simply cannot wait for another Blue Wave to do the job.

Reassessing 'Maximum Bob' Mueller Six Months On: The Special Counsel Blew It

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 21:36:00 +0000

COLIN ANDERSON / THE ATLANTIC

To say that a lot of people were disappointed with Robert Mueller is an understatement.

Okay, the guy wasn't the superman we had pumped him up to be. But in my bend-over-backwards effort to be fair, I believed that the special counsel's shortcomings were tempered because his legal remit, including a bar on indicting a sitting president, was limited.

Still, Donald Trump has gotten away with nary a scratch from his collusion with Vladimir Putin's cyberwarriors, which greased the skids for his "victory" in 2016, a devious path that he has tried to go down again in the Ukraine scandal, and that has not sat well.

Robert Barr's slimy veneer of whitewash over Mueller's final Russia scandal report has been cited as a key element in Trump's escape act, and the attorney general did indeed divert attention from more damning aspects of the 448-page report, including 10 instances in which Mueller concluded that the president tried to obstruct justice.

But the special counsel is now back on the hook -- and deservedly so -- not because of ongoing impeachment hearings, which on Wednesday produced highly damaging public testimony that Trump knew exactly what he was doing in trying to extort Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to manufacture dirt on the Bidens, but a side drama that has played out a few block from the Capitol at a federal courthouse where the Roger Stone trial began wrapping up with final arguments later in the day.

Long story short, the final prosecution witness against Stone, self-proclaimed Republican dirty trickster and the longest of Trump's longtime advisers, was former Trump campaign advisor Rick Gates, who testified that Trump may have been aware of WikiLeaks' methodical release of damaging emails hacked by a Russian intelligence service and of Stone's efforts to present himself as a backchannel to the so-called ant-secrecy group.

Trump, having refused a face-to-face interview with Mueller after months of jousting that in retrospect was ridiculous, told him in writing that he did "not recall" being aware of communications between WikiLeaks and Stone, Gates or his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

But Gates testified that Trump "indicated that more information would be coming" after getting off a call with Stone in July 2016 and said he received a directive from Manafort to check in with Stone about information incoming from Wikileaks and that other people from the campaign would be updated, "including the candidate."

Mueller handed off the indictment of Stone to other prosecutors, who charged him with witness tampering, obstructing an official proceeding, and five counts of making false statements to the House Intelligence Committee about his relationship with WikiLeaks.

But if Gates's testimony seems minor in the overall scheme of things, it is not.

This is because it calls into question why Mueller left this crucial information out of his final report, as well as what else he might have left out of a document of huge legal and historical import in making the case against a deeply corrupt president that six months after its release seems more pallid by the day. In other words, "Maximum Bob" did not live up to his reputation as a dogged former FBI director and prosecutor.

Josh Marshall puts it this way at Talking Points Memo:

As I've said many times before, you shouldn’t change your view of an investigation or an investigator just because you are disappointed with or didn't expect the result. This is a kind of situationally convenient way of thinking we should all avoid. But this isn't quite that. We're learning new facts – a lot of them – which the investigators either clearly knew (Gates was their cooperating witness, after all) or ones they should have come across but didn't.

Was Rod Rosenstein leaning on Mueller more than realized? Was Bill Barr? Neither possibility is terribly convincing since Mueller had all the clout and public attention to defy them if he wanted to. Was Mueller restraining his own investigators and this oddity of a report was the result? I'm really not sure. Certainly his public testimony and his resistance to that testimony suggested his heart wasn’t quite in it.
That seems all the more obvious in light of the confused and ineffectual Democratic response to Barr's whitewash and then on July 24 the mother of all anticlimaxes -- Mueller's halting testimony before two House committees in which his reputation took another hit.

"It was a game of chicken among chickens," as Slate's Dahlia Litchwick commented at the time.

Mueller had pointedly warned that if forced to testify before Congress, he would not say anything beyond what his report said. And when all was said and done after nearly seven hours of testimony before the Democratic-led House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, two of the committees now plunging ahead with impeachment hearings, the former special counsel did not elaborate, hewing to a letter from Barr written at Mueller's request instructing him to not answer a wide variety of questions about his investigation, which the AG asserted is covered by executive privilege but was an egregious frontal assault on the Constitution and congressional oversight.

Asked by a Democratic congressman whether the reason he "did not indict Donald Trump is because of the OLC [Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel] opinion stating that you cannot indict a sitting president," Mueller said it was, but then sought cover.

"That is not the correct way to say it," Mueller elaborated. "We did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime."

Mueller's most pointed criticism of the president at the hearing came when he said he found Trump's repeated statements during the campaign praising WikiLeaks for releasing the Democratic emails to be disturbing.

"Problematic is an understatement in terms of what it displays of giving some hope or some boost to what is and should be illegal behavior," Mueller said in muddled elaboration.

Casting future events against past performances can be unfair.

But virtually every discussion and commentary about the televised impeachment hearings ends up asking the same question: Will Democrats in a few short weeks be able to make the case Trump should be removed from office? Probably. Yet Mueller had two years and didn't even come close.

And that is that.

The New Normal: Running From Your Patriotic Duty For A Big, Fat Book Deal

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 12:47:00 +0000

JABIN BOTSFORD / THE WASHINGTON POST

The concept of what constitutes duty to country in contemporary American politics has undergone a seismic shift that the narcissistically self absorbed Donald Trump has only served to accelerate. Lapel-pin patriotism -- "see, I'm wearing the flag, so I gotta love my country" -- is an obvious manifestation, but opting for a megabuck book deal in lieu of answering the call to patriotism is the new normal.

Given the choice between trying to save the country or feathering his nest, John Bolton is taking the money -- a reported $2 million deal with Simon & Schuster for a tell-all book that is likely to be only a tell-something -- and running from his obligation to come forward as possibly the key witness to the Ukraine scandal shenanigans, which did not erupt fully formed from a single extortionate phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky but came together over months of plotting by the president and Rudy Giuliani and their henchmen to find ways to try to influence the 2020 election as Moscow had so thoughtfully done in 2016.

Bolton, Trump's third national security adviser, famously told White House aide Fiona Hill that "I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up," a reference to two players in the president's scheme to extort Zelensky into dishing dirt on Joe Biden and his son, but has decided to not appear before House impeachment investigators, let alone make a star turn at the televised public hearings that began on Wednesday.

This although Bolton "was personally involved in many of the events, meetings, and conversations about which you have already received testimony, as well as many relevant meetings and conversations that have not yet been discussed in the testimonies thus far," according to a letter from Bolton's lawyer to House Democrats that sounds an awful lot like a book promotion.

Others with books contemplated, in the works or just out include a West Wing insider known only as Anonymous, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, chief of staff John Kelly, defense secretary Jim Mattis and Donald Trump Jr.

Haley deserves special mention.

Trump's former U.N. ambassador not only has adeptly played a game of licking Trump's wingtips while tut-tutting over his more egregious excesses, but has proven expert at promoting her own new book, With All Due Respect, in which she claims that Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson tried to recruit her to work against the president in order to "save the country."

The nerve of them!

Meanwhile, Anonymous deserves special scorn.

A Warning, which is to be released on November 19, is written by "a senior official in the Trump administration" and paints the chilling portrait of the president as cruelly inept and a danger to nation and world that we have read and heard about so often in the accounts of people who don't cower behind a veil of anonymity.

A more appropriate would seem to be Almost A Warning.

Anonymous writes breathlessly that senior administration officials considered resigning en masse last year in a "midnight self-massacre" to sound a public alarm about the president's conduct, but rejected the idea because they believed it would further destabilize an already teetering government.

This almost patriotism prompts Charles Pierce to write at Esquire:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Anonymous can bite me. I have no intention of shelling out a dime to read about how someone almost ran into the burning house to save the baby, or about how someone almost gave up their seat in the lifeboat when the great ship went down, or about how someone almost dove into a freezing river to save a busload of nuns, or, for that matter, about how someone almost decided not to be a part of the most monstrous executive administration since the (un)death of Vlad The Impaler. I am not interested in someone's heartfelt account of their near-collision with actual integrity. I decline to be fascinated by the tale of how someone nearly ran into courage on the street but had to catch a bus instead. Like I said, Anonymous can anonymously bite me.
According to Dahlia Lithwick at Slate, Kelly does not yet have a book deal, but is using the threat of one as insurance against Trump going after him personally. How's that for doing the patriotic thing?

"This is the way democracy ends," concludes Lithwick, "Not with a bang but with a book deal."

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 11:29:00 +0000

MORE HERE.

Trump's Allies Are Stuck With Lemons, So They're Trying To Make Lemonade

noreply@blogger.com (Shaun Mullen) — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 22:20:00 +0000

EVAN VUCCI/ THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Removing this petty, shabby tyrant from office goes a long way to restoring and resetting the Constitution as a limit on power and a guarantee against its wanton future abuse. It must be done. With speed, with vigor, and with determination. ~ ANDREW SULLIVAN

Donald Trump's congressional Republican sycophancy has a very big problem.

The evidence that the president held up desperately needed military aid for Ukraine and a promised White House visit for its president by trying to extort him to dig up dirt on the Bidens and other Democrats in a bald-faced effort to influence the 2020 election is overwhelming. That evidence of this impeachable high crime comes not from House Democrats but 13 career diplomats and other administration officials who have disobeyed Trump's orders and appeared before investigators. And so in a contemporary turn on the old adage that if you have lemons you make lemonade, Trump's allies are desperately attempting to divert attention from the beleaguered president.

With public impeachment hearings beginning on Wednesday, Republicans are demanding that witnesses be added to the probe, including former vice president Joe Biden's son, Hunter, his business partner, Devon Archer, and the whistleblower whose initial complaint kicked off the Ukraine investigation.

Republicans, who conveniently forget they had joined Democrats in appropriating the nearly $400 million in aid Trump used as a cudgel in his extortion scheme, are alternately whining that the inquiry is unfairly partisan with presidential poodle Senator Lindsey Graham refusing to read deeply damaging witness transcripts, while trying to front load the witness list.

Through extraneous witnesses, Republicans hope to sow confusion and flog their discredited conspiracy theories, which includes beating the dead-horse canard that Ukraine and not Russia hacked Democratic emails in 2016, and characterizing Ukraine as an historically corrupt nation that the most corrupt president in American history is only trying to reform (!!!).

Then there is their attempt to shift blame from Trump onto a rogues gallery of individuals including acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, EU ambassador Gordon Sondland and fixer Rudy Giuliani, whom they ludicrously claim were pursuing their own objectives while the poor president stood haplessly by. This must be the reason there was a secret White House server on which to hide documents damaging to Trump, no?

The 2,677 pages of interview transcripts released over the past week show the extent to which GOP lawmakers, lacking the witnesses and documents to mount a defense that might undermine the withering testimony, have focused on unsubstantiated conspiracy theories when not muttering to reporters that what the president did might not have been advisable but is not impeachable. Or in the words of feckless GOP Representative Mac Thornberry, you can't impeach Trump for a crime he does "all the time."

Yes, Republicans are fully involved in the hearings even if they're trying to create the impression that they are not, and their questioning of witnesses has been short on substance while long on those pet theories.

The contrast could not be more evident than during the deposition of William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, who blew apart Trump's Ukraine defense in damning detail. When it was the Republicans' turn to depose Taylor, they did not ask a single question of substance.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that one GOP lawmaker questioned fired Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovich about her national heritage, including a suggestion her nickname Masha is Ukrainian (it's Russian, just like she is) in a fruitless attempt to find bias, and another interrogated her about whether her staff "monitored" the social media account of an alt-right conspiracy theorist whose main claim to fame is smearing a Washington pizzeria as the site of a fictional Democratic pedophile ring in which Hillary Clinton was involved.

Pretty much all of this is, of course, is ancillary to the Ukraine scandal and impeachment inquiry, which explains why Republicans also want to call a researcher for the firm that commissioned the Steele dossier linking Trump and Russia in an attempt to manufacture a nonexistent connection between the dossier and Ukraine.

The reliably wingnutty Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, argues that witnesses such as Biden and Archer would "assist the American public in understanding the nature and extent of Ukraine’s pervasive corruption, information that bears directly on President Trump's long-standing and deeply-held skepticism of the country."

Intel chairman Adam Schiff says Democrats would evaluate the witness requests but his committee "will not serve . . . as a vehicle to undertake the same sham investigations into the Bidens or 2016 that the President pressed Ukraine to conduct for his personal political benefit, or to facilitate the President's effort to threaten, intimidate, and retaliate against the whistleblower who courageously raised the initial alarm."

Complicating Republican attempts to shift the focus away from Trump is the ongoing trial a few blocks from the Capitol of fellow liar and longest of longtime confidants Roger Stone, an intermediary between the 2016 Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, which released thousands of Democratic email messages hacked by Russians.

Trump’s presidency has been defined by his belief that he cannot be held accountable.

This grossest of fictions has been abetted by Republicans whose fealty to the Chosen One is more important than obeying their oath to uphold the Constitution by acting as a check on the executive branch and the president's many abuses of power.

The frenzy of lemonade making is playing out as courts hear a seemingly inexhaustible list of legal cases stemming from Trump's stonewalling. Some may end up before a Supreme Court that won't necessarily be friendly to the president despite its right-leaning bent. Then there is the possibility that his frantic efforts to sabotage the impeachment process will themselves become an article of impeachment.

While the Republican divert-and-delay tactic is likely to work in the Fox News echo chamber and ratchet even higher the partisan rancor on Capitol Hill, it fails miserably as a defense. Minds are made up: Republicans will defend Trump at all costs, but a majority of voters favor impeachment and removing him from office.

Let's get on with it.