Category: Hindsight 2020

The Liberal Case For An American Internet PIN

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I consider myself an independent moderate liberal and generally I wouldn’t even think of supporting something as draconian as a PIN for individual use of the Internet, and yet it seems as though the time has come to have that debate.

The reason is simple –the Russians are fucking with us.

A case could be made that you could appease both the Left and the Right in the United States by establishing a nationwide Internet PIN system. It would be like a driver’s license for the Information Superhighway, to date myself with a metaphor.

It would be very basic — you simply would have to establish that you were a real fucking American citizen to use the American Internet. That’s it.

Now, I’m the first to say doing something like this is ripe for abuse on any number of different levels. And, yet, given how important the Internet is in our political system (see also Donald J. Trump) maybe the only way to throw things back into whack is to do something really incredibly draconian and crazy.

The Right would be able to crow about how terrorists who used the Internet for nefarious reasons could be tracked down and the Left could sigh a huge sigh of relief that fucking Russian trolls weren’t throwing the fucking presidential election and electing incompetnent Right Wing celebrity Twitter trolls.

And, yet, such a PIN system would likely be instantly abused so badly as to make it something we would regret the moment existed.

But I’m desperate. Really desperate.

I want my country back.

The Mueller Report’s Absolute Worst Case Scenario

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

When the House flipped, I thought we had until August 2019 to “get” Trump. Guess what! I was wrong!

The very thing I thought wouldn’t happen until August of this year, people saying “let the people decide in 2020” has already begun. It’s happening now. So, there’s no window of opportunity to “get” Trump politically. We’re stuck with him until at some point in the 2021 – 2023 period for no other reason than The Resistance is so hopelessly divided between the extreme Left that wants everyone to free bleed or be transgendered (Wink! Just kidding!) and the Centrists who just want Obama to come back from grabbing a pack of cigs at the corner store.

Hyperbole aside, right now Trump’s re-election prospects stand at 100% in my mind.

Unless.

Here’s where things get really, really messy.

I see Trump politically as a chronic illness that if not properly treated can go septic at any moment. In practical terms, that means Trump is perpetually both doing fine and about to be removed from office at the same time. This can go on for a very, very long time.

But the absolute worst case scenario is this — The Mueller Report is as big as we all hope / fear and it all happens not in the context of a Congressional mid-term, but a presidential election. The absolute worst case scenario for everyone involved is Trump realizes he faces the prospect of jail time if he loses in 2020 or is otherwise removed from office. You can babble about state crimes all you want, but apparently New York State still has an anti-double jeopardy law on the books, and, as such, Trump will likely be able to weasel his way out of it if the Federal statute of limitations expires.

Now, from Trump’s point of view, a series of things would have to go wrong for the absolute, total worst case scenario to happen. For me, that would be Trump facing a material existential threat to his administration using a metric that Blue Check Liberals would see as valid.

So, to get to that point, first, The Mueller Report has to be REALLY BAD. But even that isn’t really that bad for him. Even if “obstruction is collusion / conspiracy,” if we don’t see it because Attorney General Bill Barr pulls some stupid justification out of his ass, then Trump is safe. I say this because if the most damning aspects of Mueller’s report are held up in the courts until after election day 2020, then we will have lost the battle, but been set up for winning the war against the American Nazis that are MAGA.

But, let’s suppose things continue to get worse for Trump.

So, let’s say Bill Barr decides he has some sense of honor (and wants to do his good friend Bob Mueller & or the America people a solid) and he releases the “obstruction is collusion / conspiracy” part of the report to Congress. This promptly is leaked to the American press and it goes off like a H-Bomb across political Washington.

Now, I’m pretty sure all we’d get is simply silence from the Right Wing Echo Chamber for about 24 hours until they got their talking points. There will never, ever, ever be a point when MAGA does the Pence Pivot until it’s politically expedient using white knuckled political calculations.

Things would have to continue to get worse for Trump if the “obstruction is collusion / conspiracy” move for impeachment / conviction were to continue to move forward at this point as the 2020 campaign really began to pick up steam.

Remember, at every single moment, Republican MAGA will object to doing anything because they’ll say, “let the people decide in 2020.” And once Trump is re-elected, they’ll crow that Trump’s been vindicated and why don’t you just shut up about it all and enjoy the humming economy. (If Trump loses in 2020 — which he won’t — I don’t know what they’d do. Probably start a civil war.)

So for there to be serious talk of Trump being not only impeached in the House but convicted in the Senate, Mueller would have to lay out in a material way that not only did Trump and the Russians give each other a handjob, but that they took it to the next level and at the direction of the Russians, Trump fired the head of the FBI!

I just don’t see that happening.

I could see on a political level it being seriously suspected, but if Mueller actually could prove anything, ANYTHING CLOSE to that, Trump’s goose it fucking cooked.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that’s literally the only way that it’s actually possible that we might see Trump in front of the Senate for trial late enough in the 2020 campaign that some seriously fucking surreal things would happen.

I mean, imagine if Mueller had Trump dead to rights for the Russians directing him to fire Comey and yet Trump’s base of about 37% (80% of the Republican electorate) simply didn’t care and re-nominated him. Imagine the CNN split screen of Trump giving his re-nomination speech as very annoyed Republican Senators contemplated his removal from office for effective treason.

And it gets worse. Much, much worse.

In this absolute worst case scenario, Trump is convicted in the Senate.

And he refuses to leave the Oval Office.

Just won’t leave. He spends all day, for weeks, hold up in the White House with the FBI struggling to figure out what to do as he tweets and tweets and tweets extremely passive-aggressive shit about how everyone wants him to kill himself or how he could kill himself because of those “radical Democrats.” (I said this was worst case scenario, folks.)

How this would all end, I don’t know.

I think it would be with a 9/11 level amount of national heartbreak when the FBI, sensing that the MAGA shitheads are going to do something crazy like try to form a human shield around the White House will have to go in and physically remove Trump from office.

It’s not going to be pretty and I hope, for Christ’s sake, it doesn’t happen.

I just want Trump politically destroyed. On a human level, I hope he lives long enough to have his mind uploaded into a database so he can live for fucking forever.

Anyway, reality is much more likely to be a lot more soft, take a lot longer and be a lot more inconclusive than my dire worst-case scenario.

The Biggest Constitutional Crisis In 50 Years — The Potential Catch-22 Of The Mueller Report

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

A Constitutional Crisis usually happens not because the system doesn’t work, but because human nature runs up against at cross purposes in a quirky way that one could never foresee.

As such, given my back-of-the-envelope knowledge of the Special Council guidelines, it seems there’s a quirk that might cause the entire American Constitutional system to freeze up until someone blinks.

The potential Constitutional Crisis goes something like this: Attorney General Bill Barr being a Trump loyalist takes one look at what is laid out in the Mueller Report and sends over a few pages summing up that while some seriously shady shit happened between the Russians and the Trump Campaign, because it did not reach the level of statute for “conspiracy,” no collusion happened (even though the two things are not the same.)

Now, the crisis kicks in when one of two things happen — Barr words what he sends to Congress in some a way that it’s obvious that he’d hiding some seriously big news against the Trump Administration or it leaks out that while Trump, Don Jr. or Jared weren’t actually indicted by Mueller, a propendency of evidence points to Trump himself needing to be indicted….

…but he can’t be indicted because of DOJ guidelines…

So we would have a massive clusterfuck on our hands as Trump hunkers down to not release this information (even though he’s been babbling about the need for “transparency” for months now ) because for the ostensible reason of not “casting aspersions against the assumed innocent” (him). But because in that case only Congress could weigh the political necessity of impeachment first in the House and later in the Senate (hopefully) if they don’t get that information, they can’t very well do the job of impeachment properly.

This tug of war could go on for some time, bouncing back and forth in the Courts long enough for Trump to sail to reelection and they we actually get into the business of getting rid of Trump at some point between 2021 and 2023. The absolute worse case scenario being, of course, that Trump does Nixon one better and simply ignores SCOTUS should they somehow have a shred of decency left and vote against him when it comes to releasing as much of The Mueller Report as possible. (Given that this would likely happen in the middle of a Trump’s re-election campaign…I think he probably would ignore SCOTUS until after he’s been re-elected.)

And, yet, if you’re a Trump supporter — or one of his dipship lackies — I wouldn’t whip out your cock and start stroking it for joy quite yet. Remember, the reason why The Mueller Report is actually so important is because it will kind of mark a significant moment in the Trump Era because the now Democratically controlled House will have to weigh the political moment to see if it’s worth finally beginning the process of impeachment.

This is going to happen no matter what we learn — or don’t learn — about Trump via The Mueller Report, even if all the most damning aspects of it never see the light of day. Once the House realises they can’t use The Mueller Report as political cover, they’re going to keep investigating Trump anyway and while it might take some time, Trump’s going to have to account for his political sins at some point in the future by, say, 2023.

Or put it another way — Trump’s second term is going to fucking suck.

It’s a historical truth that typically presidential second terms are much, much worst than the first and Trump’s is unlikely to be any different. In fact, in a way, Trump’s second term, in itself, is an existential threat to Trump’s political future.

What I mean is, I give up on getting rid of Trump between 2019 and early 2021. We’re stuck with him, no matter what.

But once his second term starts, the clock resets. We have a solid three years before the talk of “letting the people decide Trump’s legacy” begins in about 2023. As such, if the House stays Democratic, which it should, Trump’s totally fucked.

He. Is. Fucked.

If he’s not driven out of office, he’ll be impeached and come extremely close to being convicted in the Senate. In fact, he might actually even be convicted in the Senate. Yes, if you’re MAGA, you’ll have had a solid six or so years of destroying America, inciting needless violence and racial discord. You’ll have had the opportunity to ram young, conservative hacks into the Judiciary. You will have gotten your tax cuts. You will have had the opportunity to destroy the environment and either destroy or dramatically change the nature of the “administrative state.”

But let one thing be clear — the political depth charge that will be Trump’s final demise at some point between 2021 and 2023 is likely to be so dramatic, so surreal and so damaging to the long-term MAGA agenda, that you fucktards might at least pause between counting your tax cuts long enough to reflect on how maybe, just maybe Trump might have been something we could have avoided if we’d be a little less craven.

So, people like me just have to hunker down for just over 2 years.

Once we lose the 2020 election and Trump runs around naked on the National Mall proclaiming his “vindication” and pardons every MAGA person in America of every crime they’ve ever thought about committing, just know that the clock, at last, is finally ticking.

My Personal Prediction For The Mueller Report

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Given that Bob Mueller is wrapping up without a major indictment of someone like Jared or Don Jr. (so far), I think it’s safe to say the Mueller Report will not be the thing that brings down Trump in any meaningful way.

In other words, the thing that everyone wants it to be — objective, non-partisan reasoning as to why Trump should be immediately removed from office for the sake of the nation — it ain’t gunna be.

What’s worse, given that Mueller is likely to say that there is a preponderance of evidence that Trump did collude, but did not “conspire,” the actual impact of the Report probably won’t last beyond one Twitter news cycle. In other words, maybe 20 minutes.

It will be a lot of news, but not much substance in the way people like me have been hoping for. Trump and his allies will came Trump has been “vindicated,” Trump will run on “Carnage Again In America” and because Democrats are so divided, he will easily win. Add to this that American Industrialists have a big old boner for Trump, I just don’t see there being any respite from this hellish experience.

What’s worse, the most damning portions of the Report are unlikely to ever be seen.

So, I guess it’s Trumps for the next 20 years until the youngest of the Baby Boomers begin to drop dead and the “browning of America” finally reaches a tipping point.

Unless there’s a race war / civil war before then.

Idle Rambling About The Novel I’m Gestating & The General American Political Stuff

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Enjoy.

Trump May Face The 1-2 Punch Of A Bombshell Mueller Report & ‘No Deal’ Brexit

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I don’t know anything, but the conditions are there for Trump to be on thin ice in the next month or so.

— The Mueller Report is set to be sent to Bill Barr soon.
— No Deal Brexit may happened on March 29th.

‘The Ides Of Mueller’ Would Be The Setup To Something Historically Messy In Scope

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Again, I don’t know anything about anything.

But if you want to waste time time with me, let’s reflect on what would happen if Friday (March 15th) was The Ides Of Mueller and The Mueller Report somehow not only dropped by was obviously an existential threat to the Trump Administration.

The thing that I’ve long thought is that if we got Trump by August 2019, we could put this all behind us and move on. But what I didn’t fact in was the the moment the polls closed for the 2018 Congressional mid-terms, the 2020 presidential campaign began.

As such, it is taking the American ship of state much longer to right its course. Furthermore, it’s possible that criminality associated with the Trump Administration is so massive that it won’t be sorted out until 2021. Thus, the drumbeat of impeachment will be just a lot of white noise in 2020 and people are really going to be more interested in the economy and paying off their mortgage.

And, yet, if The Mueller Report is the rhetorical and political equivalent of Caesar walking into the Senate in 55BC, the distance between what is politically possible and necessary may snap back into place in a pretty fast, pretty dramatic fashion. I say this because right now for some pretty white knuckled political reasons, both parties feel they have a vested interest in slow walking any talk of impeachment. They feel this, in large part, because of, you guessed it, the 2020 presidential campaign.

But what happens if The Mueller Report turns March 15, 2019 into The Ides of Mueller and the whole political equation of the moment is thrown out the window? I struggle to think of it would play out. It seems as though the House Democratic Leadership sees immediate impeachment ahead of the 2020 campaign as a fool’s errand.

I’m enough of a student of history, however, to know that occasionally the dead hand of history has other ideas. This, of course, is the worst case scenario. There are plenty of scenarios where what I expect will happen, happens — there’s a slow boil that finally begins to bubble at some point in Trump’s second administration.

If the issue of impeachment should happen to be become a crisis sooner rather than later, the most likely scenario is Trump is impeached in the House, acquitted in the Senate and he runs around saying he’s been “exonerated” of every illegal thing he’s ever done in his entire life.

But let’s play pretend.

Not know anything means there’s a chance that what I — and we — don’t know is far worst than we could ever imagine, so bad, in fact, that at some point in the next few months the “bipartisan” part of Speaker Pelosi’s demands for impeachment are met and away we go.

This is where things get crazy. Trump could literally stir up civil unrest on a massive scale. He could start to pardon everyone he needs to pardon. He hold up in the Oval Office and should be actually be impeached refuse to leave. And he might not leave unless Federal agents physically remove him.

But that’s the absolute worst-case scenario.

The absolute worse. Reality is likely to fall in some sort of murky, muddled in-between that takes far longer than any of us would like. That’s why I see Trump either being succeed in 2024 by someone like Tom Cotton or maybe, just maybe leaving power in some way around August 2022. Maybe if Ivanka is allowed to become VEEP?

Who knows. The macro problems that led to Trump aren’t going anywhere are likely bound to only get worse.

The Ides Of Mueller

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I don’t know anything about anything and you shouldn’t listen to me. But having said that, the conditions are there for Friday, March 15th to be The Ides of Mueller when The Mueller Report drops.

If it was, in fact, The Ides of Mueller, we probably would know pretty quick. Like, when we woke up. I say this because it would make a lot of sense for someone Big, say, Don Jr. to get arrested in the early morning hours.

It would make sense for Mueller to do that then turn around and submit his report to Attorney General Bill Barr.

But I’m grasping at the most gossamer of straws. It could be weeks, if not months, before the Mueller Report comes out despite all my speculation.

As an aside, while I thought if we got Trump by August 2019 that we’d be ok, I realize now that what I feared would happen at that point, that the conventional wisdom would be that we should “let the people decide,” has actually happened now.

So, in a sense, flipping the House was actually the first part of a much, much, much longer progress than I first imagined. It’d likely — almost absolute — that Trump will win re-election handily, so any impeachment proceedings would likely happen at some point in late 2021 to mid 2022. So, now it seems like we’re most likely to get rid of Trump about August 2022.

That would give Pence the ability to pardon Trump (and everyone else who needed to be pardoned) AND when two more terms in office as an incumbent.

Having said that, if things move far faster than any of us believe possible, we could very well have the absolutely surreal situation of it being absolutely clear that Trump absolutely has to be impeached — at a minimum — while the 2020 presidential campaign plays out in the background.

It would be historically messy, if nothing else.

If The Mueller Report is the rhetorical and political equivalent of Caesar walking into the Senate in 55BC, the distance between what is politically possible and necessary may snap back into place in a pretty fast, pretty dramatic fashion. I say this because right now for some pretty white knuckled political reasons, both parties feel they have a vested interest in slow walking any talk of impeachment. They feel this, in large part, because of, you guessed it, the 2020 presidential campaign.

But what happens if The Mueller Report turns March 15, 2019 into The Ides of Mueller and the whole political equation of the moment is thrown out the window? I struggle to think of it would play out. It seems as though the House Democratic Leadership sees immediate impeachment ahead of the 2020 campaign as a fool’s errand.

I’m enough of a student of history, however, to know that occasionally the dead hand of history has other ideas. This, of course, is the worst case scenario. There are plenty of scenarios where what I expect will happen, happens — there’s a slow boil that finally begins to bubble at some point in Trump’s second administration.

If the issue of impeachment should happen to be become a crisis sooner rather than later, the most likely scenario is Trump is impeached in the House, acquitted in the Senate and he runs around saying he’s been “exonerated” of every illegal thing he’s ever done in his entire life.

But let’s play pretend.

Not know anything means there’s a chance that what I — and we — don’t know is far worst than we could ever imagine, so bad, in fact, that at some point in the next few months the “bipartisan” part of Speaker Pelosi’s demands for impeachment are met and away we go.

This is where things get crazy. Trump could literally stir up civil unrest on a massive scale. He could start to pardon everyone he needs to pardon. He hold up in the Oval Office and should be actually be impeached refuse to leave. And he might not leave unless Federal agents physically remove him.

But that’s the absolute worst-case scenario.

The absolute worse. Reality is likely to fall in some sort of murky, muddled in-between that takes far longer than any of us would like. That’s why I see Trump either being succeed in 2024 by someone like Tom Cotton or maybe, just maybe leaving power in some way around August 2022. Maybe if Ivanka is allowed to become VEEP?

Who knows. The macro problems that led to Trump aren’t going anywhere are likely bound to only get worse.

The Trump Era, ‘Trumplandia,’ Is Likely To Be A Completely Value-Free Historical Experience

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

There’s a real chance that one of two things will happen — either the entire nation, in a sense, turns into Trumplandia after Trump finally leaves office in 2025, or the whole thing is completely value free.

What I mean by this is, either just like the Reagan Revolution fundamentally changed modern America’s political landscape, so too will the Trump dystopia, or when Trumplandia is over, all his defenders will slink back under the rocks from whence they came.

At this point, either eventuality is about 50/50.

I guess the only difference between the two is if we get a center-Right successor to Trump or a center-Left one. And, really, it doesn’t matter. Trump is totally destroying America on a fundamental level and all I ask is I eventually make enough money to leave the country and never come back.

If a weaponized ICE doesn’t put me in a camp before I can escape, that is.

Weighing Seriously The Chances That Brexit Will Cause ‘Trumxit’

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The only reason why I think Brexit may cause Trumxit is there’s a real chance the global economy is going to slow down significantly should No Deal Brexit happen.

One of the several unique aspects of Watergate that lead to Nixon leaving office, besides the tapes — and Nixon’s physical inability to burn them (he was in bed with a problem caused by the veins in his legs) — was the economy went south just about the time he left office.

I just don’t see anything forcing Trump out of office. The economy could crater and while he might get impeached in the House because of it, you could have a Second Great Depression and you won’t be able to get enough Republican Senators to vote for conviction.

So, really, since the United States is no longer a democracy, Trump is going to cruise into a second term no matter what, groom his young, passionate ideological successor and the only thing that might save us is two or three presidential cycles down the road some sort of fluke happens.

And, by that point, the youngest of the Baby Boomers will finally begin to drop dead just as the browning of America reaches a tipping point and maybe the American ship of state will actually right itself before blood runs in the streets.

God, I hope so.