Bits & Pieces # 127

 

Watched Mike Pompeo on This Week. He sits there and lies to Stephanopoulos with an arrogant smile and an attitude that says “fuck you” to anyone with any moral structure. It’s going to be a great pleasure to see this guy in cuffs on his way to jail.

Then we watched Mick Mulvaney do the same thing about the Ukrainian mess. Mulvaney thinks it’s okay to extort foreign governments for local political gain.  These guys are unbelievable. They aren’t “from” the swamp; they “are” the swamp. One wonders how our government came to be infected by his gaggle of criminals, but we know the answer. The people of this country elected a criminal to lead us and he has acted exactly as a criminal acts, surrounding himself with other criminals and stealing whatever they can from the country.

So why the hell did Pompeo go on the tube if he had nothing to say. Did he need ten minutes of TV time so bad that he was willing to reveal himself to millions as an incompetent liar?

When asked about he firing of Ukrainian Ambassador Yovanovich he bumbled about and avoided any kind of a straight answer. He didn’t even try to defend a person under his command. Pompeo can lie all he wants about the realities of politics or the heinous crime his boss has committed against our allies in the Middle East, but the facts are quite different.

We have abandoned our only real Middle Eastern ally to ethnic cleansing.  We are allowing Turkey, a paper ally only because they are also in NATO, to attempt to occupy parts of Syria in which they do not belong. We are allowing the rebirth of ISIS because the Turks will release ten thousand ISIS prisoners in formerly Kurdish controlled prisons to either flee back to Europe where they will renew their terrorist activities or to rejoin some twenty thousand ISIS fighters that, despite Trump’s lies to the contrary, are still active in Syria and Iraq.

In addition to this we have strengthened Russia’s hold on Syria with our abandonment of that horror of a country, and we have helped Iran to get a land bridge for their military equipment to be moved around in the Middle East. All this was supposedly done in the interest of getting American troops out of the Middle East but once again Trump is lying. Those troops are not coming home, he sent them into Iraq. On top of that he has already moved American troops into Yemen to support the ethnic cleansing of that nation by the Saudi’s.

And of curse, with true Trumpian logic, he calls the involvement of US troops in Saudi atrocities in Yemen, an act of peace. This is the degenerate we have running this country and being assisted by the likes of Pompeo, Mulvaney, Barr and Giuliani, a rogues gallery of criminals and petty punks.

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So one of the big stories bouncing around on the airwaves this week was AOC and the members of her Squad endorsing Bernie Sanders for President. AOC and her friends in the Squad have proved to be very controversial but not overly bright. Sure Bernie’s a great guy with a lot of energy and some incontrovertibly good ideas, but he‘s way too old and in ill health to try to do the President’s job the way it needs to be done.

On top of that, I still hold him and his follower’s betrayal in the last election against him. Sure they were angry about what they perceived as a jobbing they got from the DNC but they were still Democrats and they still had an election to win and they bailed, failing to support Clinton and becoming one of a number of factors that screwed the nation by allowing the fat liar to crawl into the White House.

Because of that abandonment, Bernie just doesn’t deserve to be President. AOC is going to be one hell of a politician if she ever learns when to talk and when to keep her mouth shut.

But even with the Squad endorsement Bernie is still in sixth place in endorsements, trailing Warren, Biden, Harris, Booker and Buttigieg.  Luckily for him, endorsements seem to mean a lot less now than they did in the past when candidates were chosen in back rooms and the public had a lot less to say about them.

 

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Watched Chris Christie on This Week. It would be nice if Chris bothered to do some research once in a while instead of just assuming he knows all the answers because he’s one of the smartest guys in the room. He did a whole number on how there was no way the Democrats could win with their healthcare programs because they just wanted to spend money that we don’t have. This is pure GOP bullshit. As I explained in the last blog, the money is definitely there but as of now, because of the Republicans, it’s going in all the wrong pockets. There’s plenty of money to do universal healthcare any number of different ways Money won’t be the problem, just repealing Trump’s tax plan will free up almost a trillion bucks for use in all the programs that need it. The problem will be opposition by drug, insurance and medical device lobbyists who don’t care if you get good healthcare as long as they rake in those high profits.

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Mick Mulvaney and Mike Pompeo are such obnoxious sleazes that they get another shot here. I watched them both this weekend trying to walk back stuff that they said on TV before millions of viewers, not by explaining what they might actually have said, but by telling us that we should believe what they now say they had been saying when they bumbled into the truth and not our own eyes and ears. Mulvaney made a fool of himself on This Week and then he went on Chris Wallace show on Fox and did the same thing. Even Wallace, who makes his living on a network that is on its knees before the President, can’t buy the lines of gross bullshit laid out by these liars and their fellow degenerates in the Trump administration.

When Mulvaney says that Joe Biden telling the Ukrainian government that we will stop all aid unless they get rid of their crooked Attorney General is a quid pro quo and the same thing as Trump telling the President of Ukraine that he will stop the aid unless that President helps him find dirt on Biden that he can use in the next election shows two things. One is that he is too stupid to understand what a quid pro quo is and the other is, he is such a cheap crook himself that he is okay with violating the constitution.

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The Trump people have made a big deal about Hunter Biden’s job on the board of a Ukrainian power company for which he was paid the ridiculous sum of fifty grand a month.  They had good reason to make a lot of noise about it but let’s not equate that stupid, greedy mistake with what goes on around Trump.

Hunter readily admits that he got the job because his name was Biden. He now seems to understand that taking it while his father was VP was a bad move. But, as it turns out, no one gave anything to that company because Hunter was on their board. Did they hire him because they thought they might get preferential treatment on some later deal? Sure, why else would they have hired him? But there is no evidence let alone proof that they ever got their money’s worth.

Now look at Trump. First of all he has surrounded himself with his brats, none of whom have any more value than Hunter. But Hunter went to work for a private company while the Trump brats are infecting our government. Then there’s the question of using your position to help yourself. No one has been able to point to any evidence that Hunter or his Dad did anything to help the company he was employed by get anything from the US government. Trump, on the other hand, wanted to use his Doral Country Club to host the G7, thereby bringing a lot of paying customers to a failing enterprise. It was a direct violation of the emoluments clause in the Constitution. Of course, it would never occur to Trump that they aren’t the same thing, mainly because he isn’t intelligent enough to figure it out.

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There has been a great deal of discussion about Trump making money off his position as President. I heard a GOP airhead try to fly the kite this weekend about how he is probably losing money by being President. Well, if that is true it only proves what a lousy businessman he’s always been because he flies out of Washington almost every weekend to play golf at one of his resort properties. That creates a big paycheck for whatever property he goes to, but no one seems to be making any noise about it. When Trump goes someplace he brings a huge retinue with him. The Secret Service is just the beginning. White House staffers, communications and transportation people and all kinds of others accompany the liar in the Oval Office wherever he goes. These people are housed, fed and entertained by whatever accommodation they go to. The government is billed for all of it and because it’s the US government it pays its bills.

The only time the locales that Trump visits get stiffed is when he is on one of his mob-scene rallies where his campaign finances are supposed to be paying the bills. That’s when the dead beat-in-chief resorts to his old pre-White House comportment and stiffs everyone in sight.

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Yesterday American aircraft bombed our own equipment and ammunition in Syria. Why? To keep them out of the hands of our enemies. Who are those enemies? The Turks. So how come Trump doesn’t understand what all our general’s understand? Does he need a Trump Ankara Hotel that bad?  Or is he just such a coward that he won’t stand up to a half assed dictator like Erdogan?

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Press and GOP agitators keep asking when will the Democrats vote to indict Trump? It’s really a hard question to answer. With a normal human being the House could go ahead with the evidence they already have, which would be more than enough to have any unbiased Senate convict. However, with this Senate and this President, it’s just not that simple. Trump does something new, criminal and un-Presidential at least once a day. It all keeps piling up, adding to his impeachableness. There has never been a president who even comes close to his criminal activities, especially when you realize that the stuff he is committing is probably on purpose.

Of course things would go a lot faster if those who are called by the House to testify cooperated. In fact many do not and that just slows the process down. That’s known to Trump and he makes matters worse by forbidding those called to testify to cooperate with the House

Trump’s actions are those of a guilty man. This is self-evident. This will be proven when the House releases its impeachment. Then, of course, it will be suppressed by Moscow Mitch in the Senate. The GOP is not interested in justice or the American people. Their only interest is in getting themselves re-elected to their cushy jobs. In order to do that they have to avoid being primaried by some Trump backed candidate. The way to do that is to just keep kissing his ass.