Last week was a year
What I mean by that is that this news cycle has gotten so surreal that I’m reeling. I’ll bet you are too. In fact, there’s so much that I can’t even write about it all and we usually do at least 8 posts a day here.
Here’s a partial list of stories from last week:
Trump impeached:
This is obviously and correctly the big headline. I’m sure by now you know all about it.
Oh and TRUMP IMPEACHED!
Trial standoff:
Pelosi decides to play hardball and let’s Trump twist in the wind over the holidays while McConnell worries that more Ukrainian shoes are going to drop. And they are dropping every day.
ACA ruling:
The big case potentially outlawing Obamacare all together got a district court ruling that probably means it won’t get decided by the Supreme Court until after the election. But there is an outside chance that they could take it up right away which means it would come down right in the middle of the election.
Either way, it’s the scariest case in the courts right now.
Putin planted the Ukraine conspiracy theory in Trump’s empty head:
The big scoop from the Washington Post which revealed that a number of former administration officials believe that Putin is the one who planted the Ukrainian conspiracy theory in Trump’s head and that is why he insists on meeting in private with him without any record of the meeting.
Personally, this has been obvious to me ever since he came out of the meeting with Putin in Helsinki and immediately started incoherently babbling “the server, the server…”
Rudy and Ukraine:
This should have been blaring headlines. Giuliani has been going on television, talking about Ukraine and confessing to committing more crimes. There is some suspicious evidence that Rudy is being paid by Russian money to do it.
I’m not kidding. This is real. And its been lost in the cacophony.
McConnell proclaims that he plans to violate his oath:
The Majority Leader who is busy setting the rules for the trial of the president went on Fox and made it clear that he is doing everything he can to ensure that the trial is a perfunctory acquittal and that he himself has no intention of being impartial, thereby announcing right out in the open that he plans to violate the oath he is required to take.
Trump Letter to Pelosi:
If he country survives this document will go into the Smithsonian as an example of the time we had a genuinely mentally ill president in the White House. Even more shocking, it turns out that he and his closest adviser, the white supremacist Stephen Miller, worked on that crazy thing for days!
185 judges:
That’s how many unqualified, right-wing judges McConnell has had confirmed during Trump’s reign. They were busy confirming them during the impeachment vote.
Grover Norquist always said — all you need is a president who can hold a pen. McConnell got one.
Christianity Today:
Billy Graham’s magazine came out for Trump’s impeachment and caused a gigantic brouhaha among Trump’s most fervent fans. New polling since the impeachment shows that about 40% of evangelicals agree with Christianity Today. (Most of them are probably black evangelicals but that number suggests that at least 25% of white evangelicals are actually Bible believing Christians rather than Trump cultists as well.)
Democratic primary debate:
The field is narrowing and the latest debate was actually worth watching. Aside from some natural sparring and clever bon mots, it was a substantive debate that threw us all back into an earlier time when what we used to call politics was serious, adult business. It couldn’t be clearer that any one of the those Democrats should be able to beat Donald Trump hands down. (Notice I said “should” not “would” — unfortunately.)
Trump’s looney Michigan rally:
Trump held a rally during the impeachment vote. And he was disgusting, most memorably degrading Congresswoman Debbie Dingall for voting for it after he had thought he’d bought her vote by allowing her husband, the longest serving congressman in history, to have full honors when he died.
Then he said John Dingell might be in hell.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders reappears in the most Huckabee way possible:
Speaking of disgusting, the former press secretary showed she is chip off the old block by making fun of Joe Biden for referring to his stutter in the debate. Like her mentor Trump, mocking the disabled like a cruel seven year old bully just comes naturally to her. She wasn’t the only one.
One Democrat defects to the GOP
One freshman Democrat, Jeff Van Drew from New Jersey, decided that he just couldn’t vote to impeach Trump and when he found out that his constituents were really, really pissed off about that, he switched parties. Unlike Ukrainian President Zelensky, he got an invitation to the White House and he knew just what to do — he literally pledged his “undying support” to President Trump. Of course, he later denied saying it, even though there’s video. A perfect Trumpie.
Matt Bevin shows Trump how its done
The defeated sociopathic Republican Governor of Kentucky pardoned a bunch of hardcore criminal whose families gave him money. One of them is a man who raped a 9 year old girl. Bevin says the little girl was lying.
The budget passed
The government agreed to avoid a shutdown with a gigantic spending bill and nobody really knows what’s in it because there’s so much going on.
Trump’s USMCA passed
They impeached the president and then passed the little NAFTA rewrite that Trump calls the greatest trade deal the world has ever known. I had been critical of the decision since it gives Trump a victory even as he’s being impeached but as it turns out nobody really noticed.
More military spending for no good reason:
We now have yet another branch of the military “The Space Force.” I know. We should just be grateful he didn’t insist on calling it The Trump Force.
They also added yet more billions to the bloated military budget. And Trump continues to insist that he’s a peace-loving, isolationist America First president.
He must fear an invasion by Martians.
Carly speaks out:
Carly Fiorina said Trump should be impeached. But she didn’t rule out voting for him. She’s a Republican, through and through.
The British election:
This was actually the week before but people are still analyzing it. Boris Johnson won a huge majority and Brexit is happening. Everyone thinks it shows that the Democrats can’t beat Trump. This is incorrect. Johnson isn’t Trump, the Democratic Party isn’t Labor and America isn’t Britain. Nonetheless, that day brought back that awful feeling from the morning of November 9th, 2016. I didn’t like it.
I’m sure there is something I missed. Those are just off the top of my head.
You are undoubtedly feeling overwhelmed as am I. We’ve had terrible crises that were much worse than this in the past. We aren’t at war. Most people are working. There isn’t blood in the streets.
However, I don’t know if we’ve ever had so many different small and medium crises happening at once, even as huge crises loom over us threatening the future, Trump’s re-election being one of them. It’s is almost impossible to absorb it.
My contributors and I are here trying to sort it all out seven days a week. For us, writing about it is a form of therapy in itself and we hope it provides a little bit of understanding and, perhaps, sense of solidarity to those of you who stop by to read it every day.
If that’s of some value to you I hope you’ll throw a little something in the kitty over this holiday season so that we can keep it going during what is going to be a crazy political year ahead.
And thanks for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am very, very grateful. — d
Happy Hollandaise!
.