Louis Gomert ®Texas told the House Panel today that he didn’t understand what the Democrats were doing. This is not surprising, as Louis rarely knows what anyone is doing, including himself.
After watching Louis, Jim Jordan and a couple of other Republicans fighting without ammunition, to obscure the impeachment case against Trump, I was struck by the fact that I did a good thing in leaving the GOP many years ago. It also occurred, what is infecting the members of congress now is not the GOP that existed even a few years ago.
That party understood their job in congress. They actually had the courage of their convictions even when they were dead wrong. This bunch of slovenly self-promoters, have no convictions, no morals and no idea of why they were sent to congress.
I believe in free trade, national security, zero or at least limited national debt and deficit, and the concept of law and order as established in the Constitution and defined by the Supreme Court. What I don’t accept is a government that acts with maximum cruelty in order to achieve un-American goals set by a would-be dictator who is looking only to enrich himself through the power of his office.
Even when I was a Republican I never believed in small government because I understood that this is a huge nation and a world leader and you can’t successfully run something like this with a small government. If you try, you will end up with a bunch of insignificant city-states, not a nation, and that becomes Italy in the early 20th century, and we all know how well that worked.
Watching the GOP Congressmen trying to make some kind of point with no kind of material made me realize just how terrified this bunch of pathetic sellouts really are. For them, the fight is never about how they can help the people of this nation. For them the fight is always about how anyone who doesn’t look like them is trying to take away what they regard as theirs and it’s the roadmap of how they are now appealing to their base.
They understand that their base hates the black kids who are better athletes than their kids. That they hate the Asian kids who are better students than their kids and that they hate the upscale whites that have more then them, occasionally because they actually earned it. It’s easy to hate all those people who are living the life your parents lived when you no longer do.
The GOP congressmen see this happening and realize the only appeal they can make to a disenfranchised group like this is hatred. These people voted for Trump because they had been betrayed so many times by dishonest politicians that they would vote for any non-politician even if they knew he was a crook because at least maybe he would be their crook. As it turns out he is only his own crook, but those who have been fooled so many times now refuse to admit they have been fooled again and so they will stick to their crook until the bitter end and that means the GOP must stick to him as well, even if it means that when the GOP is crushed in 2020 it will be the destruction of the Retrumplican Party. I say Retrumplican because there is no longer anything even resembling the Republican Party that existed even a few years ago. Those Republicans who were real conservatives, who retained some sense of moral integrity, who understood that they were the servants of the voters, left the party, abandoning public office because they came to understand that they had become nothing but flotsam, racing toward a sewer of despair created by Donald Trump in order to eliminate everything that stands between him and his self-enriching goals.
Those members of the GOP who understood duty, honesty and integrity are already gone from the Party. They are being followed by the likes of Paul Ryan, Orin Hatch, Thad Cochran, Rodney Frelinghuysen, Trey Gowdy, Darrell Issa and many, many more who have never had an honest moment in their lives. If Trump loses in 2020, and that is looking to be more and more the reasonable scenario, all that will be left of the proud GOP will be the dregs of the Retrumplicans and a fetid pack of scurvaceous thieves and petty con men. Without the seemingly charismatic leadership of the criminal Trump they will lose even most of the 35% of the voters that currently make up the Trump base and they will be set adrift like so much flotsam on the River of No Return.
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I find it fascinating that the same GOP sycophants that attacked Trump in the most vitriolic terms before the 2016 election now kiss his ass in the most public places. Clowns like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Lindsay Graham, Mick Mulvaney and countless others who called him a crook, a racist, an idiot and far worse on the tube, seem to have forgotten these memorable attacks and now cuddle up to the Liar in Chief, affectionately selling their last measure of self respect to gain favor with a thing that will betray them and cut them adrift at the drop of a Tweet.
The concept of conservatism exists now only in the molding memories of the ancients of the Party. Trump has managed to crush the last vestiges of any economic conservatism by ballooning the deficit to almost one trillion bucks and driving the national debt up to around two trillion. I bring this up again because this is the most wasteful kind of anti-conservatism. There is no more useless spending than that on interest because the nation gets nothing for it. You spend money on infrastructure; you get highways, and a grid. You spend money on healthcare you get wellness, on education you get better-educated kids or on the military and you get a safer nation but when you piss it away on interest you get nothing but wasted money.
Trump has also betrayed his ass kissing former conservatives on tariffs, one of his signature screw-ups. He seems to have no concept of the proven fact that tariffs are just taxes on foreign goods, paid for by American consumers. Every dollar paid in tariffs reduces our GDP by a like amount because it isn’t there to spend on goods and services.
Tariffs have so destroyed the American farming industry that it is now costing taxpayers $28 billion in bailouts. It only cost Obama $12 billion to bail out the entire automobile industry and save the American economy after Bush/Cheney managed to crash the economy on 2007.
What’s really interesting about tariffs as presented by the Trump administration is the big thief has already worked out a system of waivers by which certain favored industries can avoid them. This has created a whole industry of lawyers and lobbyists, shaping-up like longshoreman at the docks in the old days, fighting to get their clients a share of the tariff free pie.
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As we approach the House vote that will almost certainly impeach Donald Trump and then the Senate trial that will just as surely acquit him, the big question becomes why? Why are we doing this if the end result will be zero? Why do this if the only result will be to give the criminal Trump an excuse to brag about how he beat the system?
I think it’s important to understand that this is a political process rather than a judicial one because if you do, you will also understand that the point of impeachment is not necessarily regime change but to say something that makes a point. Because it’s a basically a political process, chicken shit assholes like Lindsay Graham can say that they won’t listen to any of the evidence, and a power mad degenerate like Mitch McConnell can declare that he is coordinating with the White House, in a procedure that is putting the White House on trial. That’s kind of like the jury foremen huddling with the defendant before a trial to figure out a strategy by which to fix the trial.
Great you say, but again, why are we doing this? Simply to make a point that desperately needs to be made, and possibly to create an obstacle to the President’s criminal actions and inclinations that threaten the legitimacy of our next election.
The Russians interfered with the 2016 election. This is not conjecture. This is fact, attested to by every single intelligence agency attached to this Government and many from other countries. It wasn’t new and it wasn’t novel. It has been going on for years all over the world but our goal is to keep our elections as pure as possible. When I say “our goal” I am not including Donald Trump who has demonstrated over and over that his goal is to undermine the truth and make it look like no one but Joe Biden has ever tried to affect an election.
Trump’s reasons are two fold. One is to enhance the fallacy that he won the election without anyone’s help and the other is to create a pathway to achieving the same result in the next election.
This is not conjecture. He has publically and repeatedly announced his desires and intentions on numerous occasions. Sure he denies it with the next breath but that means nothing. If he had no intention of interfering with the honesty of the next election he would never have voiced it in the first place. He’s devious and criminal, but not very intelligent.
The basic reason for the impeachment is one of national honor. We must not allow a President with criminal intentions to run roughshod over the constitution. It’s not like anyone from the GOP is denying any of the facts in evidence that have been presented to accuse Trump. The Republicans are simply ignoring those facts and fighting like mad dogs to make the rest of the country ignore them too, because the only way to ignore Trump’s guilt is to not deal with the facts of his actions.
Right now a partisan Senate is going to ignore a partisan House and refuse to convict a criminal President. The result of that action will be to seriously impair the legitimacy of our democracy. The whole concept of democracy depends on the universal acceptance of the concept that we must do the right thing. The GOP has discarded this concept simply because it’s inconvenient to the pursuit of their electoral goals.
They are unwilling to allow such pedestrian concepts as honesty, integrity and the good of the nation to get in the way of retaining what power they still wield.
The question we each have to ask ourselves is do we want a constitutional democracy, or do we want to abandon that in favor of Trump’s dream of a monarchy where the President is not accountable to anyone but himself. Following the GOP down this rat hole will most certainly lead us down the a path to being a Nazi Germany, a Husainian Iraq or the North Korea of Kim Jong-un.
Much has been made of the similarities of Trump and Nixon. It may be more interesting to compare the differences. What Nixon did was obviously wrong, but at least he recognized it as such. When congress demanded he turn over certain tapes and documents, even though he saw that it would destroy him, he did as requested because he had retained enough basic sense of responsibility to understand that it was within the purview of congress to demand and receive the evidence. Trump, on the other hand, because he has absolutely zero sense of honesty or integrity has stonewalled congress on their requests for documents and witnesses; refusing to acknowledge any rights except those he attributes to himself. In refusing to cooperate he has laid the groundwork for the second indictment, obstruction of congress. Of course no one cares about the indictments as we all know they will be voted down in the Senate but at least the House will have gone on record as having called the President on his illegal and un-presidential behavior.
Once finished with that process it will be time for each Democratic candidate to embark once again on a campaign to show the American people that they represent the only viable plans whereby the country can unmake what the criminal Trump has wrought and set us on a course to really make America great again in a way that is good for us and good for the world.
Not one observation missing in this breakdown of what is going on – of Trump and those that support him. Thank you. I only need to show this as representative of my views. Thanks for doing this for me.