A new book, A Very Stable Genius, written by Carol Leonning and Philip Rucker, has just been published. It’s pretty scary, especially if you haven’t been paying attention to the lack of intelligence in the White House. It’s mainly it’s about how incredibly ignorant and uninformed Trump really is. I’m telling you now, read the book. But for those who need additional encouragement let me give you a few examples of why.
The President, who is always telling us about how the constitution doesn’t apply to him, really has no idea what’s in the constitution because he has never read it; has never been able to read it. The authors describe an occasion when Trump was supposed to read the Constitution on TV and he just wasn’t able to do it. He couldn’t read the English of the original document. He stumbled and fumbled over and over until he quit, telling the techs that surrounded him that “it’s like a foreign language.” Really? For those of you who have also never read the Constitution let me assure you, it is very much in English.
Another short but convincing example was when he visited Pearl Harbor and had to ask his assistant what was significant about Pearl Harbor? YOU TERRIFIED YET? One more example, not from the book, from TV this week. It seems Trump found himself in a discussion on protecting intellectual property laws and stated. “ You know you have to protect Thomas Edison and we have to protect all these people that, uh, came up with, originally, the light bulb and the wheel, and all those things…” You like horror movies? Read this book!
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So the impeachment trial started on Monday morning when Government Counsel, Pat Cipolonni and chief prosecutor Adam Schiff had their opening shots. Cipolonni was short and sweet, like any government defense counsel for Donald Trump should be. After all what could he say? He mumbled some altered facts, told a few lies and retired from the fray leaving himself a good deal of room to double back and retell his story later.
Schiff, on the other hand, attacked with all guns blazing, pointing out how Moscow Mitch had set this whole affair up as the most unfair of trials, not even a real trial by any American standard. He pointed out how among the many dichotomies of the McConnell plan, real trials have witnesses and facts presented before the closing arguments and not after. If Moscow Mitch gets his way this farce will result in an unfair decision no matter what it is, simply because it will not have been decided on any functional basis of law. What Schiff stated was that this joke of a trial had been set up by McConnell to acquit the President regardless of facts and that Moscow Mitch has never cared about facts or justice, only about getting his own way.
It was not very surprising that shortly after Schiff and Cipolonni had finished, Moscow Mitch announced that he was backing off a couple of the rules he had established. The press went wild making one wonder if these people had just cracked the shells of their eggs. What McConnell was doing is what every good dealmaker does. He was giving away a couple of the useless points, which he had thrown in specifically to be given away in order to look like he was being reasonable. He wasn’t! Moscow Mitch and everyone else knows that the only important point in the trial is that the evidence and testimony must be presented before anything else happens. If that isn’t done, the fix is in. It’s that simple folks. In fact it’s so simple that there seems to be a small but maybe inevitable swell of discrete blowback against Mitch and his idiotic rules. Who knows, maybe it will eventually amount to something.
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In tying together the previous two items of this blog, I will refer you to three separate TV appearances by President Trump. In one he calls for testimony to be given by himself and his associates in the House impeachment investigation. Of course he actually prevented any of that happening by invoking a Presidential immunity that actually doesn’t exist. In another Trump stated unequivocally there was no accusation of any obstruction of justice in the Mueller papers when Mueller clearly states that there are 10 instances where Trump obstructed justice. And the third occasion was this week when after stating over and over that there was no reason to present documents to the Senate because none of them were relevant, Trump goes on the tube and tells the nation that his side has all the papers and the Democrats have none. Why? Because the White House hasn’t allowed them to be released.
The whole argument is about truth and the ability of those involved to accept facts. It is always the basic argument in any debate because, in order to have a debate of any sort we must establish what is and what isn’t true before going on to decide what we are going to do about whatever we are discussing. That is why perennial liars like Trump and his sycophants disrupt the whole process and create chaos, which is what we have now, and as long as it is permitted to exist, that’s all we will ever have and the country will suffer and die because of it.
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The three worst presidents of the last two centuries have all been Republicans. I don’t know what relevance this has to the above comments but it seems to be very important to how our country survives and moves forward. Richard Nixon, George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Two have pushed the impeachment button and the third lied us into a two-decade war and then crashed the economy. Bush may not have been evil but he was lazy and stupid which is almost as bad for a President.
It’s clear that this proliferation of awful GOP Presidents is leading us into the demographic theory that by 2050 the Republican Party will be insignificant and we will be a single party nation. Much as I feel that the current Republican Party is a curse on our nation, I feel that leaving us with a single party is just as bad or maybe even worse. It’s what Trump is fighting for now because he doesn’t want to lead a democracy, he wants to rule a dictatorship.
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In his opening of the impeachment defense Pat Cipolonni’s first statement, the one in which he said the debate was now going to hear the facts, included a lie in his second sentence. This, of course, is the way the GOP understands the idea of facts or the concept of truth. Then Mike Purpura went on a long harangue about what proportion of Ukrainian financial help came from other countries. What the hell does that have to do with anything, let alone this trial? Then he talked for five minutes about Javelin missals. Neither subject has anything to do with this trial. This trial has only to do with the question: did Trump try to extort help against a political enemy by withholding funds earmarked by Congress for foreign aid? Two things are very clear from the impeachment trial so far. One; the Republicans have no case at all. Their only defense is no defense. Almost all their “facts” are lies and they have no argument to support their President. Second; none of it makes any difference. The GOP will not condemn Trump, no matter how overwhelming the evidence, simply because they see it as in their best interest to say, “fuck you” to the Constitution and the American people in order to keep their cushy jobs.
Of course as in all else, they are so incompetent and so nearsighted that they don’t realize this action will end the careers of many of them during the 2020 election, but more important is that they will go down in the annuls of history as a treacherous gaggle of criminals who were willing, no, eager, to sell out the nation to back a criminal President.
This was clearly illustrated when George Stephanopoulos asked Oklahoma GOP Senator James Lankford five different ways, if it was okay for an American President to ask a foreign government to investigate a political opponent outside the country. Lankford evaded the question each time it was asked, using a different answer each time but never actually answering the question. George was too much the coward to accuse Lankford of being a liar, he just didn’t have the guts to put Lankford down for what he was.
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Chris Wallace and Alan Dershowitz had a really interesting argument on Fox this Sunday in which Wallace attacked Dershowitz’s contention that regardless of whether or not Trump is guilty of anything the House accuses him of, none of it is an impeachable offense. They both proved that intelligent men can go on for hours arguing a difficult point but it seemed to me that both ignored one very salient point. Dershowitz claims that none of the acts that Trump committed was impeachable but in his argument he quotes the criteria for impeachment, which lists treason and bribery along with high crimes and misdemeanors. His mistake is that he ignores the fact that the impeachable criteria includes bribery which is exactly what Trump tried to do when he told Zelensky that he wanted a favor and held the four hundred million in aid over his head. The fact that the money was not paid until the crime was revealed doesn’t let the President off the hook as an extortionist; it emphasizes his guilt. Don’t forget, Dershowitz makes no argument about what Trump did, nor has anyone in the House or Senate. The GOP has accepted what the House laid out and has not even tried to defend Trump on those grounds even though he is obviously guilty of bribery and extortion. And bribery is specifically identified in the Constitution as an impeachable offense. So Alan is wrong even if you don’t bring up his Clinton argument, made from the other side of the question. It’s obvious that a man as brilliant as Alan Dershowitz can muster a believable argument to defend anyone who is paying him. He has done this in both the Clinton Impeachment and the Trump Impeachment.
This is a snap for a man who teaches law at Harvard. But I wonder how much weight is given to who is actually guilty or innocent in his classes.
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Just to tie things up I’d like to draw attention to Peggy Noonan, brilliant reporter, cutting edge critic of the scene and dedicated Republican, who has sized up the entire mess created by Donald Trump and the cowards that follow him. She warns them all that they are hanging over a cliff with their anchor foot on a banana peel. They must, she states, vote to hear witnesses, especially after the revelations about Bolton’s book, or they will surely go down in 2020. They must, she warns, do the right thing because over 75% of the voters want the right thing done. That’s how big a group wants to see and hear the witnesses, because that’s about the percentage of the public that is smart enough to know the truth when it is shoved in their faces. They already know Trump is a sick liar. They already know that one has to be a naïve fool to believe anything he says, so they want to hear someone else, almost anyone else not under his thumb, tell them what really happened between Trump and Zelensky during that fateful phone call. And if they don’t get what they want they will take revenge on those who kept it from them on Nov 8, 2020. They will crush Moscow Mitch and every spineless flunky who follows him and that will be the end of the GOP as we know it.