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“These are times that try men’s souls,” said Thomas Paine, accidentally channeling late 2019 — and an even more prescient Patrick Henry replied: “Kiev me Liberty or Kiev me Death!” Less dramatically, we’ll settle for your being able to comment again without manual approval.
History will show this to have been an historic week. We have a significant new national scandal, as yet unnamed. (I know that “Kiev Me Dirt on Biden” is not going to happen, but I welcome suggestions from others who are enamored of how the name of Ukraine’s capital sounds like Mr. Chekhov saying “Give.”) Rudy Giuliani will end up turning state’s evidence to save his own miserable hide. Trump will be impeached, but not removed from office — although several Senators dragging down by having to justify his actions likely will. And we’ll get to all that!
But none of that, none of it, is as historically important as the fact that OJ Blog’s commenting function has been fixed, meaning that conversations between regulars (and past-commenters generally) here can take place in something like real time, rather than once-a-day interchanges along the lines of communications with a satellite scoping out some passing satellite for traces of iridium — sweet, sweet iridium. Temporarily, at least, it’s a good time to be alive. “Our long bloggerial nightmare is over,” to paraphrase newly elevated what Vice President Gerald R. Ford got to say 45 years and 49 days ago, and Mike Pence may or yet be able to repeat (less convincingly) at some point. Your thoughts are welcome and — for those who have ever posted here and not been put on the Mod List — once again unmoderated!
This is the first Weekend Open Thread we’ve had in almost a month, so we’ll celebrate it by noting some good news from our local politicians.
OC Plays a Role in Fostering Impeachment!
Lookin’ a little smug for a good reason!
Gil Cisneros of AD-55 just strode into the history books, thanks to the wonder of alphabetization. Cisneros is as the (only technically, so far as I know, but still) lead author among the seven moderate, military-veteran, first-year Democratic Members of Congress who published a joint OpEd in the Washington Post that, seriously may have changed history.
Not a bad gig! Here’s the call-out that may makes the high school civics books:
The president of the United States may have used his position to pressure a foreign country into investigating a political opponent, and he sought to use U.S. taxpayer dollars as leverage to do it. He allegedly sought to use the very security assistance dollars appropriated by Congress to create stability in the world, to help root out corruption and to protect our national security interests, for his own personal gain. These allegations are stunning, both in the national security threat they pose and the potential corruption they represent.
Since Tuesday, when it came out, a few things have happened.
- Two alternative theories have arisen. First, that Trump was using foreign policy not only to convince Ukraine to Kiev (get it?) him dirt of Joe and Hunter Biden, but to get it to conclude that the entire “Russia investigation” was a Democratic plot hatched in Ukraine.
- That Trump was using the promise of a personal visit appearance with Ukraine’s President — whose first name is too close to “Voldemort” and last name is too close to “Lewinsky” for me to remember the actual thing and it doesn’t help things that he looks like Jeremy Renner, who played Hawkeye in the Avengers movies — rather than the promise to open the foreign aid tap to get them to serve his evil personal political ends.
Comic premise: Donald Trump accidentally tries to extort Hawkeye. Hilarity ensues. Damn, where’s Lorne’s mobile number? [Note: work in Trump as Fat Thor.]
More importantly, the first notion doesn’t matter! You’re not supposed to use foreign policy to wring a favorable judgment from a foreign government’s intelligence services for any self-serving reason! (Note that this is not the same as not using foreign policy to promote one’s own political fortunes, as Richard Nixon did with visiting China and — in his twisted mind — bombing Cambodia. That’s awful, but it’s not that uncommon. What Trump has done is to try to enlist another government to come up with facts and findings that he could use in a campaign, which among other things leaves him way open to what would be the flavor of extortion that is blackmail.
I think that Trump, quite legitimately, does not know the legal difference between gaining political favor with the public by staging a favorable photo op (which Ukraine’s Voldemort Lewinsky may well have wanted to do), and twisting a country’s arm to have their intelligence or judicial agencies come up with an opinion exonerating oneself or incriminating someone else. They’re both exercises of power, but only the latter involves perversion of truth and/or justice. It’s like the difference between badgering Stormy Daniels until she’ll have sex with him and ordering a Secret Service agent to hold her down while he rapes her. Power is power, right? And lack of consequences means one may never learn the difference.
Donald Trump thinks that he’s a generally dapper, street-smart, and intelligently manipulative Mafia Don type like Tony Soprano. He’s actually — and yes, I know this would be better presented as a meme — an ignorant and clumsy blowhard like Paulie Walnuts, who couldn’t do a small fraction of the time that Tony spent in jail paying for his crimes and went ape-shit (perhaps helping to arrange the final black-out hit on Tony) trying to get out.
“Hey, Tone! You think I’m smart enough to be President, right?”
The importance of what history (being lazy and not wanting to offer the textbook space to write out “Seven moderate veteran military freshman Democrats”) may record as “The Cisneros Letter” is that it gave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the ideological clearance she needed to come out for a real impeachment inquiry — one from which, unlike most normal Congressional inquiries, the President may have a hard time denying documentary evidence. (Now with this Supreme Court, who knows? Maybe it will overturn U.S. v. Nixon. But I don’t think that Chief Justice John Roberts wants that as his legacy.)
Two things of beauty to note on this topic, before we move on to other fun things:
“Look, just because you leave the head of a guy’s dead horse in his bed doesn’t prove that you’re making some kind of threat!“
- Rudy Giuliani, with his intemperate admissions, and his designation that he — the President’s personal attorney, rather than some combination of the Department of Justice and Department of State — was the one with whom Voldemort Hawkeye was supposed to deal when it came to hunting Hunter Biden — will have been the downfall of Donald Trump. I don’t know that I could ask for anything better than that!
- Yesterday’s late news was that it was not just the original transcript of the Ukraine conversation — not the released summary of that transcript, which is dead certain to be less incriminating — has been locked up in a database with super secret “must know code to access” to keep it safe from whistle-blowers, leakers, journalists, and members of Congress. No, it seems that it shares that lodging with at least several other records of Trump’s phone conversations (and God knows what else) that are hiding there.Do you realize what this means? Trump is hiding his documents on an improperly privatized server! Hillary Clinton should have a blast with that one!
All right, no time or space here to tell you about what’s been going on with Sharon Quirk-Silva (who has been having a very good month), Katie Porter (ditto), Bill Brough (definitely not), and so on — but now that we’re back in tune you can come back and look for it soon!
This is your Weekend Open Thread. Talk about that, or whatever else you’d like, within reasonable bounds of discretion, decorum, decency, dignity, and documentation. Welcome back, commenters!
P.S. OK, OK: it’s “Volodymyr Zelensky.”
…”I knew Andrew Johnson, Andrew Johnson was a friend of mine…Mr Trump, you are ‘No’ Andrew Johnson”!
Do you mean that he won’t get impeached … or that if he does get impeached he will be removed?
What a load of crap keep dreaming. Waste of money and time.
Well argued. I’ll mark you down for “could not care less about limits on Presidential self-dealing, even when it comes to shaking down foreign governments,” though I doubt that you could have written or punctuated that.
Slate makes a point about the Ukraine Call (I think that that’s the scandal’s name now) whistleblower that I wish I’d thought of, which is the sort of reason that I keep on reading the blasted site: we know that one person who had gathered the information from others decided to blow the whistle on it, but how many people with enough information about the call to blow the whistle on it failed to do so? At minimum, about a couple of dozen.
That we only know about this thanks to a brave act that any person had only about a 4.5% chance of doing is terrifying.
Another good read from Slate, on Trump’s styling himself on John Gotti and being mentored by (and wanting his own) Roy Cohn. (All he got was Rudy Giuliani.)
Coincidentally, sort of, a new documentary is out on Trump and Cohn! You can read the LA Times review here.
It’s not a matter of Donald J.Trump at this point,it is a question, will the Republicans ‘step up’and not put party ahead of the nation and the world’s future.
Lets just stop pretending our system operates under the rule of law.
I hope that the House of Representatives impeaches Trump. Let me tell you what will happen next!
1. The House can pass articles of impeachment over the objections of the Republicans, and refer to the Senate for trial.
2. The Senate will conduct a trial. There will be a vote, and the Republicans will vote unanimously, along with a small number of Democrats, to not convict the President. Legally, it will all be over at that point.
3. However, during the trial, and this is what no one is thinking about right now, the President’s attorneys will have the right to subpoena and question ANYONE THEY WANT.. That is different than the special counsel investigation, which was very one-sided. So, during the impeachment trial, we will be hearing testimony from James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Glenn Simpson, Donna Brazile, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, Christopher Steele, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, James Clapper, and a whole host of other participants in this whole sordid affair and the ensuing cover up activities. A lot of dirt will be dug up; a lot of truth will be unveiled. Finger pointing will occur. Deals will start being made, and suddenly, a lot of democrats will start being charged and going to prison. All this, because, remember, the President’s team will now, for the first time, have the RIGHT to question all of these people under oath – and they will turn on each other. That is already starting.
4. Lastly, one more thing will happen, the Senate will not convict the President. Nothing will happen to Trump. Most Americans are clueless about political processes, the law, and the Constitution. Most Americans believe that being impeached results in removal from office. They don’t understand that phase 2 is a trial in and by the Senate, where he has zero chance of conviction. Remember, the Senate is controlled by Republicans; they will determine what testimony is allowed — and **everything** will be allowed, including: DNC collusion with the Clinton campaign to fix the election in favor of Hillary, the creation of the Trump dossier, the cover up and destruction of emails that very likely included incriminating information. They will incriminate each other for lying to the FISA court, for spying and wiretapping the Trump campaign, and for colluding with foreign political actors, especially George Soros. After the Senate declines to convict the President, we will have an election, and Trump will win. It will be a backlash against democrat petulance, temper tantrums, hypocrisy and dishonesty. Even minorities will vote for Trump, because, for the first time, they will see that democrats have spent 2+ years focused on maintaining their own power, and not doing anything at all about black murders in Chicago, homelessness, opioids, and other important issues that are actually killing people. And, we will spend the following four years listening to politicians and pundits claim that the whole impeachment was rigged.
So let’s move on to impeachment.
Okay, Bob.
They can call all of those witnesses … and those witnesses can simply refuse to answer questions irrelevant to impeachment. (And they would be irrelevant.)
The problem with your theory is that Chief Justice Roberts actually DOES care about how history will perceive him. He’s not going to let a trial become a farce.
Nice concern trolling, though!
Nice summation, Bob.
Those of us who are old enough heard the same sort of rhetoric 1973. Once Trump’s can of worms is opened, all sorts of slithering, slimy thing are going to come out. It’s the Trump minions who put their worthless jobs ahead of loyalty to the Constitution who are going to turn on each other.
How would YOU like to share a fox hole with Donnie Jr, Eric, Jared, Rudy, and Bill Barr?
A case can be made to show relevance to the impeachment. As I said, any questions can be asked by the Senate. It doesn’t have to be compelling to the matter at hand. All that has to be explained is that they are trying to make a connection to the accusations against Trump and it will be admissible. If they take the 5th and refuse to answer, the case becomes far weaker. If you doubt this, follow the legal analysis for corroboration of my claim. This bs will not get passed the house and will die in the senate before it ever gets off the ground.
If it’s a narrow impeachment over the Ukraine Call, then anyone unrelated to that will simply challenge the relevance of any evidence they might have to offer, both before and, if necessary, during their appearance. Their refusal to answer questions won’t “make the case weaker” if they have nothing to do with the case. CJ Roberts has nothing to gain by allowing the trial to be turned into a circus.
I don’t know the specific Senate Rules for an impeachment trial, and if you know of any that say that any question of any person is relevant just because it was asked, then please produce it. The Constitution says that the Chief Justice will “preside” and I don’t think that any Senate rule can force him to, for example, demand that people answer questions irrelevant to the charges, except when their own credibility as witnesses to the bases for the charges is at issue — which, in the instances you mention, would not be the case.
Once Bill Barr releases his report on the origins of the Russian collusion hoax and it clearly shows, as we already know that the Obama admin/DNC employed the services of the Ukrainians to influence the 2016 election, it’s game over for the salivating impeachment Dems. Not only that, Biden has far more evidence against him for interfering and influencing an investigation against a company that his son worked for by using the powers of his office and threatening to withhold aid money if his demands weren’t met. Clearly a quid pro quo, at least from all outward appearances, clearly something Trump was legally within his right to point out to the Ukrainians and ask for finality into the investigation or do you believe Biden should get a pass just because he is in a run for the White House?
Articles of Impeachment:
Extortion of Ukraine
Manipulating Foreign Policy for Personal Benefit
Serial Violation of Emoluments Clause
Issuance of Security Clearances to Family members
Obstruction of Justice
Collusion with Russians
etc., etc., etc.
David, the accusations you list are simply made up charges by the Dems in an attempt to bring down Trump. Most of these accusations have already been dismissed. I’m surprised you are still pinning hopes on any of these pseudo-charges in ejecting Trump from office. However, if you want to see people being charged with crimes, wait til the IG report on the origins of Trump/Russia collusion is made public. You will see many Democrats and some Republicans getting a new orange jumpsuit wardrobe. This will be true justice as the constitution intended.
Bob, please tell me how each of these accusations is “made up.” They are all there for the world to see. That’s how Trump has always operated – his latest con job on full display.
What others may or may not have done is a diversion only a mental deficient would fall for. In other words, the garden variety Trump supporter.
It has been sad learning that there are so many willfully ignorant adults in the U.S., although Menken would have told us the Coca Cola belt is a lot wider and deeper than anybody but the hardest cynic could have imagined.
What flabbergasts me is hearing Trump use the word “corruption.” He claimed he was only pestering Ukraine because he was concerned with their “corruption” problem and wanted to see how he could help them fight “corruption.”
I would like somebody to ask Trump how he defines that word. I think that, channeling Nixon to Frost, he’d say, “If I do it, it’s not corrupt, but if my enemy does it, that’s corrupt.”
The funniest part of that is not even that trump himself is so utterly corrupt, but that he really seemed to expect people to believe he cares about corruption at all.
His best pals are Putin, Kim What’sHisName, and that creepy Crown Prince of Crime, MbS. He sees no problem doing business with them, especially if he has something to gain personally.
Well, somebody always comes along to scream at the deaf, now I guess it’s me.
Yeah, but.
The CIA didn’t make the Ukraine call. The CIA didn’t send the blithering idiot Giuliani on secret spy missions. The CIA didn’t hide the call files on a separate server.
The CIA didn’t make the Saudis and the Air Force peons go Trump hotels. The CIA didn’t force the top secret clearances on unqualified Trump relatives. The CIA didn’t try to get Sessions to end the Russia investigation or fire Comey. The CIA didn’t invite Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.
The idea of the CIA being self-serving is not even relevant. What is relevant is what Trump has actually done and said – without the need for anybody to fabricate it.
Trump: “Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China!”
Celebrating 70 years of totalitarianism, gulags, international terrorism, communism and state run economics.
Good to know who your friends are. Our hero.
*Congrats to the Chinese also for finally doing away with the ONE Child Policy and adopting the US Socialized/Capitalism Model…..which insures that NO ONE can afford to have children. Also, to the Chinese for all of their Technological Breakthroughs which will insure they are leaps and bounds ahead of the USA for the next 1000 years. Chaing KaiShek and his Madam…….got Taiwan and 100 Million dollars in Gold. Mao got the Billion people and a great farming program which stopped famine and created what is now known as the Great Future!
The Chinese has yet to actually kill anyone in Hong Kong – while we have more blacks in our prisons than the population of many African Nations……meanwhile, we kill lots of Yemeni and Afghans on a daily basis. Maybe Trump will build the next Trump Tower in Beijing and we will have world peace!
“Congrats to the Chinese ALSO?”
Nobody here is congratulating those tyrants. Only Trump is.
*In the spirit of fairness of course Chairman Vern! Whatever happened to words like “Laughing Stock” or “Ink in the Ointment”? This Impeachment talk is amazing. The Guy robs a bank and the House wants to get him on Double Parking in front in a loading zone! You know who we feel sorry for? Andy Yang…..we like that guy, because he actually has some good ideas!