Skip to content

Month: December 2019

Trump the Messiah is being impeached for our sins

Published by digby on December 19, 2019

Trump the Messiah is being impeached for our sins

by digby

If you thought Trump’s whining about how the Salem Witch Trials were more fair than the impeachment hearings was bad, get a load of this one:

“When Jesus was falsely accused of treason, Pontius Pilate gave Jesus the opportunity to face his accusers. During that sham trial, Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus than the Democrats have afforded this President in this process.”  — GOP Rep. Barry Loudermilk 

This is the essence of the Trump defender’s message all day long. Their Dear Leader is being crucified in a process more unfair than that which was inflicted on Jesus Christ.

And they are all persecuted Trumpists.

Meanwhile, the real world:

The whole speech was very well done.

If you want to hear the meat of the case against Trump in a serious way, here’s Schiff:

It’s done.

Everyone says that it will be the first line in Trump’s obituary. Not true. It will be up top, for sure. But the first line will be that he was the most unfit, corrupt,traitorous president in history.

Just saying.

It’s Holiday Fundraising time. If you’re of a mind to support the kind of independent media we provide here, informed by nearly two decades of daily observation and analysis, you can do so at the links below or at the address on the column on the left.

Again, thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. It means the world to me. — digby

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

,

Put Amash on the team

Published by digby on December 19, 2019

Put him on the team

by digby

I’m on record supporting the idea of putting Justin Amash on the House Manager team. I think he makes the case for his inclusion here:

As I said before, I think it would be powerful to have a former Tea Party Republican making this case. The fact that he’s the only one of his class adhering to the principles they all pretended to have speaks volumes about who they  are.  I doubt more than a one out of a hundred Republicans would give a damn but in a close election next fall, that one percent could be decisive. Democrats should recognize that he might be able to speak to some people they cannot reach —- not in the Senate but out in the country.

It’s Holiday Fundraising time. If you’re of a mind to support the kind of independent media we provide here, informed by nearly two decades of daily observation and analysis, you can do so at the links below or at the address on the column on the left.

Again, thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. It means the world to me. — digby

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Trump committed a federal crime. Too bad he can’t be prosecuted for it. And nobody wants to impeach him for it either. Oh well.#StormyDaniels

Published by digby on December 18, 2019

Oh look, more evidence of Trump’s criminality

by digby

Trump loves to quote the moral scold Ken Starr defending him on Fox News:

Golly, maybe the Democrats should have impeached Trump for the crime we have incontrovertible proof of since Ken Starr and the rest of the boys continue to say that you can’t impeach a president without one.

This is from USA Today last July:

A day after the public heard Donald Trump boasting about grabbing women’s genitals in a leaked “Access Hollywood” outtake, the Republican presidential candidate and some of his top aides began an urgent effort to silence a pornographic actress, according to court records unsealed Thursday.

The documents, part of the FBI’s investigation of a hush-money scheme, show agents gathered evidence that Trump participated in an effort to pay off Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress who claimed to have had an extramarital affair with him years earlier. Authorities laid out a timeline of emails, text messages and phone calls – some involving Trump himself – that “concerned the need to prevent” Daniels from going public with her story.

Trump denied knowledge of the payments after they became public. The FBI told a judge it obtained telephone records showing he participated in some of the first conversations about the scheme, which prosecutors said violated federal campaign finance laws.

Federal prosecutors said in court filings last year that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, orchestrated payments to Daniels and another woman, Karen McDougal, “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump. The documents unsealed Thursday offer an account of the extent of Trump’s involvement in that effort, which came at a particularly sensitive moment weeks before the 2016 presidential election.

The Justice Department told a judge Monday that it “effectively concluded” its investigation of the payoffs, signaling the end of one of the criminal inquiries that shadowed Trump’s presidency. 

Federal prosecutors’ decision to end the investigation relied at least in part on long-standing Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime, a person familiar with the matter said.

Ken Starr recommended impeachment of President Clinton based upon one alleged lie he told in a civil deposition in a case that was dismissed by a judge.

The Republicans went crazy, screeching for months about “the rule ‘o law” and wringing their hands over what they could tell the children because of the president’s grotesque personal behavior.

But they are fine with this:

 

 And they are fine with Trump illegally paying off porn stars from the oval office too:

I’m sure you remember seeing those checks signed by the president after he won the election.

I understand why the Democrats decided not to impeach Trump for this. It’s icky. But it’s a real crime and the evidence is there and he’s going to get away with it.

It’s good to be a Republican.

It’s Holiday Fundraising time. If you’re of a mind to support the kind of independent media we provide here, informed by nearly two decades of daily observation and analysis, you can do so at the links below or at the address on the column on the left.

Again, thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. It means the world to me. — digby

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

There are still a few Republicans who share our reality. Too few, unfortunately.

Published by digby on December 18, 2019

There are still a few Republicans who share our reality. Too few, unfortunately.

by digby

Here is a well reasoned argument for impeachment by that bleeding-heart liberal — Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano:

The rule of law is a cornerstone of American democracy and is integral to the U.S. Constitution. It stands for the principles that no person is beneath the laws’ protections. No person is above the laws’ requirements. And the laws apply equally to all people. That is the theory of the rule of law.

In practice, as the power of the federal government has grown almost exponentially since 1789 and the power of the presidency has grown with it, presidents have claimed immunity from the need to comply with the law while in office. They have also claimed immunity from the consequences of the failure to comply with the law.

That immunity claim is predicated upon the belief that if the president committed a criminal offense and was charged and prosecuted while in office, the diversion of his energies to his defense would interfere substantially with his ability to do his job, which could jeopardize national security.

When the Department of Justice looked at the law of presidential prosecutions, it produced three scholarly reports during the Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton impeachment investigations. Two of those reports concluded that no president could be charged or prosecuted while in office.

Those two reports were relied upon by Attorney General William Barr when he brushed aside the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller, who found enough evidence to charge President Donald Trump with obstruction of justice after Mr. Trump repeatedly attempted to interfere with Mr. Mueller’s investigation by ordering subordinates to lie to FBI investigators or to falsify government documents that investigators sought.

Mr. Barr did not address the merits of Mr. Mueller’s findings. In Mr. Barr’s view, no matter what the president did — even if anyone else who did the same would have been prosecuted — the disruption to the government would not be worth the benefits of a presidential prosecution.

The third scholarly DOJ report concluded that the president is not above the law and that if sufficient evidence of presidential lawbreaking does exist, he ought to be charged. However, the prosecution should be deferred until he leaves office.

All three DOJ reports agreed that if the president’s behavior, though uncharged, nevertheless amounted to “high crimes and misdemeanors,” he should be impeached.

High crimes and misdemeanors is a basis for impeachment, the constitutional remedy for presidential behavior that subverts our democratic institutions. In Mr. Trump’s case, we have undisputed evidence that he abused his power by inviting a foreign government to interfere in the 2020 presidential election and then compounded this by directing subordinates to refrain from giving congressionally commanded evidence of his behavior.

It is undisputed that Mr. Trump withheld the delivery of the $391 million in military aid to Ukraine that Congress authorized and ordered and that Mr. Trump himself signed into law. He said he withheld that aid because he first wanted “a favor” from the president of Ukraine. The favor, requested by others on Mr. Trump’s behalf, was the announcement of a Ukrainian government criminal investigation of Mr. Trump’s potential political adversary, former Vice President Joe Biden.

In the language of the streets, this is a shakedown; it sought to enhance Mr. Trump’s personal political needs and bears no relationship to American foreign policy.

That presidential behavior implicates two crimes. One is the federal prohibition on soliciting campaign aid from a foreign government — whether the aid arrives or not. It did not.

The other crime is bribery, which is the exploitation of public duties for personal gain. Bribery consists of the intentional refusal to perform a required public duty — here, releasing the $391 million to Ukraine — until a personal thing of value — here, the announcement of the Ukrainian investigation of Mr. Biden — arrives. The crime of bribery is complete when the thing of value is solicited, whether it arrives or not. It did not.

The other crimes implicated by Mr. Trump’s behavior took place after he was accused of the first two. Then, he directed his subordinates to disregard congressional subpoenas, lawfully issued and validly served, which sought testimony, documents and electronic records of the president’s behavior.

We know from the impeachment charges recommended by the House Judiciary Committee against Richard Nixon and voted by the House of Representatives against Bill Clinton that obstructing the constitutional duty of Congress is impeachable. We also know from the Roger Clemens case, in which he was prosecuted, and acquitted, for obstruction of Congress by allegedly lying to a House committee, that obstruction can be criminal.

Because Mr. Trump declined to participate in the House investigation that resulted in the construction of the articles of impeachment against him — except for his tweets and bluster and the Republicans’ personal attacks on House Democratic committee chairs — the facts underlying the charges against Mr. Trump are essentially uncontested.

Everyone who believes in the rule of law should be terrified of a president who thinks and behaves as if it does not apply to him. As the DOJ has stated repeatedly, impeachment is the proper constitutional remedy for that.

James Madison, the author of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, feared a government that was strong enough to protect the people would become too strong for the people to control. It would use its powers not for the nation’s betterment but its own. When the government fails to control itself, he argued, when the president becomes a law unto himself by violating the laws that pertain to all others, the remedy is impeachment.

The framers’ greatest fear was a president who would unlawfully put his own needs above the nation’s or who would drag a foreign government into our domestic affairs. Mr. Trump has tried to do both and threatened to repeat those attempts. That’s why the remedy of impeachment is acutely needed.

It is possible for a conservative to see the truth. We saw it from former CIA and FBI director Judge William Webster the other day. We see it with the vociferous cadre of Never Trumpers who have been stalwart in their opposition to Donald Trump despite all the cash incentives that Trumpism has brought to the party.  We know that many of the white, suburban, women who have always voted Republican voted for the Democrats in 2018 and remain hostile to Trump and what the GOP has become.

Those who have resisted understandably are not entirely trusted by Democrats due to heir own roles in bringing us to this place. But I’m not going to chase them away. If they still live in reality we can all agree to deal with the immediate threat and fight another day.

If Roosevelt could ally with Stalin to beat Hitler, this is not that much of a stretch, particularly if some of these folks truly have had their eyes opened and are willing to use the talents they honed destroying Democrats to turn on Donald Trump. Welcome to the resistance.

But damn, there is just a handful of those folks. It could be enough to turn a close election, god (and Putin) willing. But tens of millions of Republicans in this country and all their elected representatives have enthusiastically leaped aboard the Trump train and left their common sense and decency behind.

Tonight Trump will be doing a rally in Michigan and if you tune in to it you will see a bunch of slavering fanboys and girls screaming with delight at every grotesque insult and lie he tells. I don’t know what it will take to break the spell. I remain hopeful that they will do what they did to George W. Bush who once held a 90% approval rating and fell to 28% at the end of his second term, many of them Republicans finally seeing the light as the world around us burned. God knows I hope it doesn’t take a tragic war and a global financial meltdown to make that happen again.

But let’s face it, it didn’t take long for them to drink the kool-aid again. We may defeat Trump but the atmosphere and conditions that brought us Trumpism have been with us for a long time. This is an ongoing fight. In fact, we’ve been fighting it in fits and starts from the very beginning.

It’s Holiday Fundraising time. If you’re of a mind to support the kind of independent media we provide here, informed by nearly two decades of daily observation and analysis, you can do so at the links below or at the address on the column on the left.

Again, thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. It means the world to me. — digby

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

After impeachment, the very stable genius isn’t going to let this Ukraine thing go

Published by digby on December 18, 2019

The very stable genius isn’t going to let this Ukraine thing go

by digby

Can you believe that? Everything, EVERYTHING about this man is projection. You can make book on the fact that everything he accuses others of doing he is doing himself. It is one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever observed in politics — in life! — and I’ve been around a while.

I think the next year is going to be even more astonishing. I hope you’ll join me here at Hullabaloo for the “festivities”. It’s going to be a wild ride:

President Donald Trump is being impeached today. How many of us would have been surprised by that if we could have seen into the future three years ago? I wouldn’t have been. It was clear from the moment he stepped on that escalator in the summer of 2015 that he was unfit for the job. Then again, who thought he would win at that point? From the day he took the oath and gave that dystopian “American Carnage” inaugural address it was clear that this was going to be a dark time. It was easy enough to predict we’d end up here sooner or later.

Unlike Richard Nixon, Trump has no intention of resigning. And unlike Bill Clinton, he has no intention of apologizing either. He remains totally defiant.

Trump sent a six-page letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday, making his feelings about this whole thing known. It will no doubt go down in history as one of the most bizarre public documents ever written by a president. And there can no doubt this president actually wrote it. The New York Times and the Washington Post both confirmed that Trump had been working on the letter for days, with the help of close aide Stephen Miller and a couple of other staffers. This suggests it had actually been edited to some degree, which is hard to believe.

A sampling of some of its emotional outbursts :

You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!

By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on American Democracy.

You dare to invoke the Founding Fathers in pursuit of this election-nullification scheme?

Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying you pray for the President when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense.

You have developed a full-fledged case of what many in the media call Trump Derangement Syndrome and sadly, you will never get over it!

You view democracy as your enemy!

You conducted a fake investigation upon the democratically elected President of the United States, and you are doing it yet again.

It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!

To be clear, those exclamation points were in the original.

I saw this letter variously described by commentators as “unhinged” and a “kind of spasmodic incontinent rage,” which sounds right. Mostly, it reads like a junior high school kid’s break up note. Again, I might have thought Trump had dashed it off in a fit of pique and demanded that it be sent before proofreading it — but this is apparently something he worked on for days. Frankly, that alone should be an impeachable offense.

Fox News commentators thought it was perfectly normal, of course. Some even compared it to the Gettysburg Address. I’m not kidding.

By Tuesday night Trump was calmed down a bit and tweeted that the wasn’t worried about any of this, not one bit:

It’s unclear to me why he is so worked up about this. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear that he will do everything in his substantial power to protect Trump and make sure he gets through this trial with as little exposure as possible. He’s not going to be removed from office and he knows it. Trump still claims he wants a full show trial and there is still some talk of having witnesses. But I’m betting this will be as perfunctory a process as they can get away with so they can move on to Phase II: Giuliani Boogaloo.

I think the Republicans have gathered that Trump isn’t going to let this go. He will spend the rest of his term and the entire campaign insisting that Ukraine really interfered in the 2016 election and that Joe Biden is a corrupt criminal who should be locked up. I expect he’ll do that even if Biden doesn’t win the nomination. After all, he still elicits boos at his rallies over Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Clinton isn’t running, and McCain is dead. He sticks with his greatest hits.

As I wrote the other day, I also think that McConnell and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., may have promised Trump some Benghazi-level fireworks if he backs away from a full-blown trial aimed at “exonerating” himself. (For one thing, they know it would likely do the opposite.)

But no matter what they do in the Senate, Trump and Rudy Giuliani are committed to this conspiracy theory and they are running with it. In the midst of a historic impeachment debate over their scheme to bribe Ukraine into smearing Joe Biden and boosting to a discredited conspiracy theory about the 2016 election, Giuliani has been tweeting madly and giving interviews to major news organizations, in which he confesses to elements of the abuse of power Trump is being impeached for.

Giuliani told the New Yorker, “I believed that I needed [former Ukraine ambassador] Yovanovitch out of the way, she was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody” and repeated that to the New York Times. He slightly changed his tune for Fox News host Laura Ingraham, saying he had to “force her out” because Yovanovitch was corrupt for refusing a U.S. visa to a Ukrainian prosecutor who has Trump and Giuliani running around in circles.

Marie Yovanovitch was not corrupt:

Giuliani told CNN that Trump fully supports his efforts and the president backed him up in an appearance on Monday:

But the plot, as they say, thickens. One of Giuliani’s Russo-Ukrainian accomplices, Lev Parnas, was back in court on Tuesday after the government found out that he’d forgotten to mention a $1 million transfer from Russia to his wife’s bank account during his bail hearing. It turns out that the money came from the pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who is currently fighting extradition to the U.S., where he faces federal charges.

Giuliani has at one time or another claimed that Parnas and his partner Igor Furman were on the Trump legal team and were also clients. A lot of money has been flowing from Russia into U.S. politics through them, which is what got them in trouble. And nobody quite knows who is paying Giuliani, who is nominally working for Trump without pay. Needless to say, speculation is now running rampant that Trump and Giuliani’s entire Ukraine scheme may have been funded with Russian money.

All those Republican senators who are lining up to let Trump off the hook may rue the day they made the decision to vote against impeachment. Trump won’t shut Giuliani’s crusade down. He wants “total exoneration” and Rudy promises to deliver it. He’s got Graham promising to bring Giuliani up to testify before the Senate. So this isn’t going away, and nobody knows what other rocks may be turned over in the next year.

Vulnerable Republicans up for re-election next year may have to answer to their constituents for this vote in ways they don’t anticipate. Trump always leaves a trail of suckers in his wake.

If you like what you read here on Hullabaloo, I hope you will give some thought to supporting it with a little Christmas cheer. The next year is going to be one for the books and we hope to be here documenting the whole thing every single day.

Thank you for reading and for your generosity.  It means the world to me. — digby




Happy Hollandaise!

The political media is in danger of failing again. We have to push back.

Published by digby on December 18, 2019

The political media is in danger of failing again. We have to push back.

by digby

From the time I first started writing this blog many years ago, I’ve been criticizing the political media. It’s not because I dislike newspapers, magazines and cable news. I love them. I really do. I’ve been a political junkie since I was a kid and journalists have always been my heroes. And they still are today.

The problem is that our political media are stuck in some very destructive grooves much of the time and have allowed themselves to be pushed around by the right wing over many years to such as extent that their portrayal of events is biased. By that I don’t mean they overtly take their side. But in their desperate desire to appear “fair”  they end up giving a skewed version of the truth.

A case in point from the past weekend:

That headline from the New York Times is technically accurate. But it isn’t the truth.

There is no “dispute” over facts, the facts are the facts and only one side of this partisan divide is “disputing” them.

The impeachment is partisan, but the partisanship in this case is not defined by a debate between two groups with different ideologies. Neither is it polarized between the two parties because of crude tribalism. The divide in this nation between those who are still governed by reason and facts and those who are not. Indeed, we see former Republican thought leaders, officials and operatives now standing on the Democratic side of the divide, despite serious differences in political philosophy because their former party is no longer rational. That has never happened in my lifetime.

Many in the media remain unwilling or unable to grasp this simple truth and it’s making things worse.

As Columbia Journalism Review pointed out over the weekend:

When it comes to much impeachment coverage, bothsidesism isn’t the beginning and end of the problem, but part of our broader reflex to frame contentious political stories around the concept of partisanship. In parts of the press, a set of party-oriented impeachment narratives has taken hold that contains some truth, but also rests on a selective interpretation of available evidence. Entrenched partisanship—in Congress and the country—is real, and newsworthy, as is the role that our fragmented information ecosystem has played in stoking and reinforcing division. And yet it does not follow, as some journalists and pundits seem to have surmised, that impeachment has been a waste of time. At the beginning of his show yesterday, Todd said the “national response” to impeachment has been “whatever.” And yet, as I wrote earlier this month, support for impeaching Trump, while recently static, is historically high. (A Fox News poll out yesterday reinforced that finding.) Six Republicans in Michigan are not the country. 

The media’s job, done properly, is multidirectional: it holds power to account, and communicates matters of public interest to news consumers. On impeachment, too much coverage seems to have got stuck in a feedback loop: we’re telling the public that politicians aren’t budging from their partisan siloes, and vice versa, with the facts of what Trump actually did getting lost somewhere in the cycle. The cult of “both sides” is integral to this dynamic, and it’s serving the impeachment story poorly. Now, more than ever, our top duty should be to fight for the truth.

We saw how this sort of coverage played out in 2016. I warned about it in real time all the way back in 2015. Recall this lovely headline:

The coverage of the presidential race arguably brought us where we are today and many in the media have never grappled with their responsibility for that.

And we are in grave danger of it happening again as you can see by that headline above.

Here at Hullabaloo, we’ve been relentlessly critiquing the media from day one. And I think that over time, blogs and other social media have made a difference. The mainstream media have, in general, improved massively since the days when they would treat Rush Limbaugh as a respectable commentator. For the most part the media has polarized too and while that has huge problems it’s certainly better than the right wing having sway over all media.

But this problem still exists and we have to keep pushing.  You can bet that as long as this blog continues, we will keep doing that. And it’s going to be more important than ever going into this election. We simply can’t let what happened in 2016 happen again.

It’s Holiday Fundraising time. If you’re of a mind to support the kind of independent media we provide here, informed by nearly two decades of daily observation and analysis, you can do so at the links below or at the address on the column on the left.

Again, thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. It means the world to me. — digby

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

.

Festivus arrives early by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 18, 2019

Festivus arrives early
by Tom Sullivan

On the eve of the House impeachment vote, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page whose text messages became fodder for years of personal attacks by the president of the United States gave her first television interview on the “Rachel Maddow Show.” In hundreds of cities from coast to coast, in fair weather and in single digits, thousands of protesters called on Congress to defend the Constitution and to impeach and remove Donald Trump from said presidency. Trump himself began Festivus early with a 6-page airing of grievances addressed to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Trump called the impeachment vote scheduled for this morning a “perversion of justice” and an “attempted coup.”

“Typically a president’s words are weighed very carefully, especially at a moment of constitutional significance,” said Michael Waldman, a White House policy aide and speechwriter during the Bill Clinton impeachment. In this case, White House counsel Pat Cipollone was not involved. Instead, Eric Ueland, director of the Office of Legislative Affairs, helped draft the letter with input from top Trump policy adviser, Stephen Miller, and Michael Williams, an adviser to acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

“Angry white mail,” late-night host Stephen Colbert called it.

The Washington Post’s fact checker describes it as a “written version of a Trump rally.”

Former Republican congressman David Jolly warned that Trump’s lie-filled screed is suggesting “Congress’ ability to provide oversight to the president has someway eroded to the point where it’s no longer valid … We are in a dangerous spot.” He is “tearing at the fabric of Article 1.”

New York Times conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin writes:

On the eve of his impeachment, a stain that obviously torments him more than his enablers have let on, President Trump issued a rambling, unhinged and lie-filled letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). It is difficult to capture how bizarre and frightening the letter is simply by counting the utter falsehoods…or by quoting from the invective dripping from his pen.

What is most striking is the spectacle of the letter itself — a president so unhinged as to issue such an harangue; a White House entirely unable to stop him; a party so subservient to him that it would not trigger a search for a new nominee; a right-wing media bubble that will herald Trump for being Trump and excoriate Democrats for driving the president to this point; and a mainstream media not quite able to address a public temper-tantrum…in which one major party has bound itself to the mast of a raging, dangerous narcissist while the other cannot uphold the norms and institutions on which our democracy depends.

Former Obama White House staffer and Pod Save the World co-host Ben Rhodes tweeted, “The fact that the Trump letter is not seen as an insane, alarming, authoritarian warning about the decay of our political system is a signal of how far norms and expectations have moved in politics and media the last three years.”

As confirmation, New York radio host Mark Simone, a longtime Trump friend, appeared on Fox Business’ “Lou Dobbs Tonight” to liken Trump’s primal scream to the Gettysburg Address. He urged everyone to read it.

Naturally, Trump’s red-hatted fans will not.

And here we are. On the cusp of we know not what. An emotionally stunted, ignorant man — an alpha-coward — has seduced a large minority of “freedom-loving” Americans into surrendering their volition to his vanity. Many risked their lives to defend this republic. Now they risk their republic to defend a fool who would be their king.

We are in grave danger.

(h/t D.B.)

It’s Holiday Fundraiser time. If you can help support this old blog, I’d be very grateful.

— digby

Happy Hollandaise!

All impeachments are not the same

Published by digby on December 18, 2019

All impeachments are not the same


by digby

I was looking forward to reading this reminiscence of the Clinton impeachment process by some of the reporters who are covering this one today. Alas, instead of a recognition that the Clinton case was a partisan overreach by the Republican congress to shame the president to resign in retaliation for Richard Nixon’s impeachment or even a rather banal observation that the impeachment of Trump is based upon unprecedented lawlessness and corruption, we get things like this:

BAKER: Writing about the president’s lies and sexual adventurism did not make one popular with the Clinton White House, that’s for sure. I remember one day having a White House aide yell at me over a story he thought was wrong. He got so angry that he finally shouted, “If you don’t get that, we have nothing to talk about!” And then he stormed out of the room. The problem was we were in his office. (The story later turned out to be 100 percent accurate, by the way, but in fairness to the aide, the president was deceiving all of them too.)

But we had White House briefings every working day. As heated and hostile as it got, it would never have occurred to the White House in that era to shut down news briefings. It would have looked weak and gone against the notion that there was still an obligation to answer questions, or at least allow questions to be asked, no matter how uncomfortable it was. 

HULSE: There is much more hostility now toward the media on the part of some lawmakers. And I don’t think lawmakers and journalists have the same deep relationships that we were able to have in the past.

Uhm. No shit? Trump calls you “the enemy of the state!” People spit at reporters at his campaign rallies. Nutcases have sent pipe bombs to your offices. Good lord.

More importantly, Trump used hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to shake down a foreign leader to smear his political opponent, using Russian propaganda! He is an unfit imbecile and you simply cannot say that about Bill Clinton for all his other faults.

I get that they can’t use words like that. They have to maintain some decorum. And this was mostly a light story about what long hours they worked etc. But still. Articles like this make a case that the two impeachments have pretty much the same dynamics, partisan will be partisans, oh heck.

But they all know that Bill Clinton and Donald Trump cases are completely different. The 7 year pursuit of Clinton based upon gothic Arkansas gossip culminating in the president’s tawdry misbehavior did not add up to High Crimes or Misdemeanors while Trump’s grotesque corruption and abuse of power are more comparable to Nixon’s bill of indictment.

They know this. And yet the reflexive need to be “fair and balanced” makes it impossible to say much more than tepid comparisons like the one above.

These are all good reporters and I think they were probably just chewing the fat about the good old days when they were all 20 years younger. But it does reflect the fact that the way these elite reporters view politics is jaded at best and downright delusional at worst. The processes of these two events more or less followed the constitutional process but the charges could not be more different.

The Clinton impeachment was an early manifestation of the GOP’s descent into batshit craziness. It was no more normal than the dubious 2000 election, the Iraq war lies, birtherism, the hissy fit over Obamacare or … Trump.  It’s important to remember that this is all part of the same thing.

Update:

Oh dear God:

It’s Holiday Fundraiser time. If you’re of a mind to throw a little something in the stocking I would be most grateful — digby

Happy Hollandaise!

.

Cheer up! More incriminating evidence for Trump’s crimes is on the way! @spockosbrain

Published by Spocko on December 17, 2019

Cheer up! More incriminating evidence about Trump’s crimes is on the way!

by Spocko

I hear a lot of people saying, “Of course the Senate won’t vote to convict Trump.” Maybe, but as a time traveler my job is to remind people that people are still investigating all of Trump’s crimes every single day. I can’t tell you the specifics of the latest crime to be revealed, but the windows to watch are in one hour, 17 hours and Friday the 20th.

More incriminating evidence of Trump’s crimes keeps coming in every day.

People like Trump swim in a sea of crime with other criminals. They are kept afloat by laundered money, mob lawyers and compromised politicians.

People say, “If what Trump did that came out during the Mueller report didn’t get him removed nothing will!” Not true!

Who the crime hurts makes a difference. Why did Bernie Madoff go to jail vs others? He ripped off the rich.

Trump cronies are in jail and are going to jail. People who turned states’ evidence, like Gates, are going to jail. He provided info that would put anyone else but Trump in jail.

If you want to bring down someone whose crimes are supported by the powerful, you show how they screwed the powerful OR you show them committing a crime that disgusts everyone* no matter how rich they make the powerful.

(*And it can’t be killing people or sexual assault. Look for videos of them kicking dogs. )

Anything that clears someone or something of guilt or blame is exculpatory. Exculpatory comes from the Latin word exculpat, meaning “freed from blame.” The verb exculpate means to free from guilt or blame.

Remember when Nancy Pelosi turned to the camera and defined exculpatory for Trump?

If Trump had exculpatory evidence he would bring it. If he had witnesses to clear him of guilt he would let them testify. He hasn’t. Instead he has had his legal team block potential sources of additional incriminating evidence and witnesses instead of looking for exculpatory evidence and witnesses.

This should cheer up people who worry that this Senate vote is the end of the process to remove Trump.  Eventually a crime that screws the powerful who support Trump will be revealed.
Or a crime that disgusts everyone,* no matter how rich they make the powerful, will be revealed.

Working for justice is hard. I want thank all the people who keep perusing justice in their own areas. You can’t know which case will be the one that makes the difference. But you MUST keep going!

As Ezra Klein said on the Lawrence O’Donnell show last week, when people like Trump get away with something, they don’t say, “Whew, I just barely escaped that. I’m not going to do that again.  He says, ‘Great. That means it is a usable strategy and I will use it again.”

It’s holiday fundraiser time. If you’d like to help keep this blog afloat for another year, you can hit the buttons below. Thank you so much. I’m more grateful for your support than you know.— digby

.