By now, many of us have seen the video of the Kurdish Women’ Protection Force sniper barely avoiding having her head blown off by a stray bullet. She laughs it off. Literally laughing in the face of death.
Our president is currently a deranged racist misogynistic traitor, so he’s hung the the Kurds out to dry. This is similar to what Nixon did to the Kurds with the Shah. But we did managed to do the right thing with a different group of American allies — the Hmong. They were fierce fighters during the Vietnam War and, as I understand it, we allowed them to come the States en masse.
There are obviously a shit ton more Kurds than Hmong, but we as a nation ever want to find some absolution for electing a tyrant president I suggest we might look into giving the Kurds in Syria a similar gimme. If they can prove they were forced out of Syria because of Trump’s treason, we let them into the country, few questions asked.
For any number of reasons, I doubt this will happen. Trump’s likely — with the aid of Moscow Mitch — escape defeat and we’ll careening towards full blown tyranny. But in the unlikely event we do manage to save ourselves from ourselves, letting the Kurds we betrayed into the country is the least we can do.
Are you ready for your close up, Mr. Rather?Shelton Bumgarner
by Shelton Bumgarner @bumgarls
I always find it amusing when I notice people from the Deep South checking out this blog. I can only assume they get off on my worst-case-scenario hot takes for the Republic. If you are, in fact, such a person, please fuck off.
The real tragedy of all of this is we’ve done it to ourselves. Hollywood loves alien invasions (V) or alien-robot-invasions (The Live,) but it turns out we have seen the enemy and they are us, as Pogo would say. It’s not aliens that have done this to us, it’s the systemic rot found in the Republican Party itself. As I’ve said before, the stakes could not be higher in this crisis.
The long touted Constitutional Crisis is finally here. The battle is joined. And a lot of fuckwits on the Right are spooging at the idea that MAGA is finally throwing down the gauntlet. They like the idea that Trump would go on the offensive, damn the consequences.
That is all well and good, but by doing so, Trump has opened up a Pandora’s Box. The thing about a crisis is things move so fast that “normal” people who have a vested interest in the slow and steady often have no idea how to handle the events going on around them. It’s the freaks and weirdos who live in a constant state of crisis who thrive. (That would be me. I’m talking about myself.)
But, the point is, there’s a chance that now that House Trump has crossed the Rubicon, that there will be an equal and opposite reaction on the part of House Democrats. They may find they have no recourse than to use their inherent contempt powers. Of course, putting Bill Barr or Mike Pompeo in the House jail is likely to make things even worse for everyone involved.
Then there’s the chance that Trump will dox the whistleblower on Twitter and “joke” that MAGA with their AR-15s should “teach him a lesson.” Republicans will of course be cool with this — they have no shame, after all — but the rest of the body politic might not take “he was just joking” defense as legitimate.
Really, there’s even a chance that Trump will finally get to be the best at being worse — he might tell his MAGA supporters to take up arms against Congress as events progress. He can tell them he’ll pardon them if they do it. Again, Republicans will lulz this even as it actually begins to happen.
I’d like to think the military might sit on its hands, no matter what, but who knows. Again, that’s why this is a crisis. I just can’t fathom any kind of endgame right now. Whatever happens, we’re in a new political era — maybe even epoch –in the nation’s history. The worse part of all of this is it’s likely to be just a brief respite. At best, we escape another MAGA president in 2020 should we manage to banish Trump politically. If it’s not Tom Cotton, it will be Kris Kobach…and the list goes on.
And, sure, I know there might be MAGA people who read all of this and don’t see as a reason to fight back, but as a reason to embrace the warm waters of tyranny. If you’re that person — please, for the love of God, fuck the fuck off.
Anyway. Now what. If we can’t banish Trump politically pretty soon all is, in fact, lost. The guy is a menace to the Republic. He needs to be removed from office, given due process in a court of law and, if convicted, put in prison for the rest of his life. If he’s a free man, he’s going to meddle in election after election until Don. Jr. or Ivanka becomes president.
So, apparently, Donald Trump political genius is beginning to settle on the idea that all of this is just a Deep State conspiracy to bring him down. Now, in a sense this is effective messaging, I also think it’s something of a stopgap.
I say this because Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg and Matt Drudge weren’t exactly pillars of objectivity when they concocted their plot to bring down Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton did, in fact, do something wrong and Donald Trump, too, has in fact done something wrong. He has done several Big Boy Crimes, in fact.
But when you’re desperate and involved in a total war against your political opponents, you try to spin anything that might help you with the base. Apparently there is some sort of connection between the whistleblower and a major Democratic candidate. If Trump did, in fact, do Big Boy Crimes, I don’t see how that is really of any concern. I guess they can say that what Trump released doesn’t prove anything and, lulz, fuck you.
Trump knows he has Moscow Mitch as his firewall, no matter what. So, I guess he really is going to get away with this and go full Mad King on us. I see no reason to think that this is the end of American democracy as we know it. Trump, in an effort to save himself, will break the back of the Constitution and that will be that. I will find myself in a re-education camp soon enough, never to be seen again.
As of right now, my only hope is Trump will do what he always does, which is self-own. In this case, his self-own is likely to be in the guise of going completely bonkers after he is formally impeached. But that’s debatable. The stakes could not be higher and the good guys don’t always win.
Now that we’re in the “total war” phase of the impeachment imbriglio, Rudy has been invited to testify before Lindsey Graham’s Senate Committee. What they want to do is spend as many hours as necessary to to the attention to the Bidens’ involvement in “corruption” in Ukraine.
I dunno.
If a Senate Democrat asks a pointed question, Rudy either flips out or Graham turns the guy’s mic off. There goal is to completely muddle the situation to such an extent that the average person “doesn’t know who to trust.”
Will it work? It has a good shot of doing so. Republicans have finally decided to go the gotterdammerung route and destroy everything in order to protect Trump. Either Democrats radicalize momentarily to do something about this, or they don’t.
Editor’s Note: If you LIKE the idea that the Republican Party is now a criminal fascist enterprise that wants to destroy the Republic, well, fuck you.
I have written about this strategy before. In more informal terms, this is the “Fuck you, see if you can convict me in the Senate” strategy. Trump simply hunkers down and refuses to budge on anything.
TrY AnD SeE If YoU CAn ConVICt Me.
They have also tried to suggest that what’s going on is a “Kangaroo Court” but that’s more base messaging than anything else. The base has no idea what a Kangaroo Court is, but it gives them something to throw about in a conversation to “own the moment.” Also, it’s just a Big Lie and Republicans have started to use it gratuitously in a desperate attempt to get the notion to stick.
He won’t let anyone testify. He won’t give over any documents. He whips up the base on Twitter and demands absolute devotion from Republicans. All things being equal, this is a smart strategy. Republicans have stuck with him this long through some pretty horrible things, so he has ever reason to believe they will continue to do so. Apparently the base is flipping out to 2016 levels which they were going to do anyway in 2020, so maybe they’ll just stay riled up until then.
The only weakness with this strategy are really more observations that the best laid plans of mice and tyrants don’t always go according to plan. One possible weakness is, as always, Trump himself. But he’s held up pretty well. He’s still cogent. He comes off as mad as hell, but not so bonkers that Republicans begin to feel nervous having to defend the indefensible.
Another potentially problematic aspect of this strategy is its extremely high stakes. These are the highest stakes possible. Trump risks radicalizing House Democrats to such an extent that they start to use inherent contempt knowing they will face only minimal blowback from the public. But given that Moscow Mitch has indicated that he will single handedly kill an impeachment trial in the Senate, I guess Trump figures it’s all worth it.
Once Trump is acquitted, then the Constitution is a dead letter and Trump is free to become the Putin-style tyrant he always wanted to be. Anyone who thinks we’ll be afforded the opportunity to “let the people decide” in a free-and-fair 2020 election should Trump still be in office is a fool.
We were so busy worrying about the views of drunk guys at a honky tonk just outside Phillie that we totally missed what was going on in the highest reaches of government.
It’s now clear that there is only one endgame — should there ever come a point when Trump faces a final defeat at the hands of SCOTUS (debatable that will ever happen, but you can dream) Trump is simply not going to comply.
He will simply allow that — obstruction of SCOTUS — to be added to his impeachment charges. In a way, this plays in to Trump’s general strategic goal of forcing a terrified Republican Party to bring down the entire Constitution to protect The Dear Leader. Or, put another way, this is the effect of it. Trump is too stupid to think in those terms, but that’s how it will shake out.
And, honestly, Trump has a twitter feed, there’s little to stop him from telling MAGA people to pick up their AR-15s and disband Congress. If there’s any civil disturbance, he uses that as the legal excuse to disband Blue State governments and establish military districts like during Reconstruction.
Nothing has happened to lead me to be any other endgame is possible. The rot on America’s civil society was far more extensive than any of us could have possibly imagined. The Republican Party sees democracy as purely transactional. In other words, they only believe in democracy when it afford the option of them getting back in power. Otherwise, fuck you.
When one of a nation’s two major political parties systemically doesn’t believe in democracy then, well, that’s all she wrote. Moscow Mitch squashes an impeachment trial in the Senate and Trump is free to do whatever the fuck is necessary to win the 2020 election. In his second term, he goes full tyrant more than he already has.
People — like me! — start to “disappear” into ICE camps across the country. Late night talk show hosts crack wise about it but nothing, really, is done about it.
I guess there’s a chance Trump will finally completely lose his mind, but there’s just as much chance that he will go bonkers and Republicans won’t blink an eye.
I don’t know what to tell you folks. We’re definitely in an unprecedented political crisis that could go either way, but the fact that Republican thought leaders are Newt and Graham are now attempting to “Kavanaugh” the current Trump situation is telling.
I dunno.
As you may recall, back in the quaint olden days, there was something called “borking.” This was the successful effort to paint Bork as too extreme for the Supreme Court on the part of the Democrats. Flash forward about 30 years and we now have entered the age of kavanaughing. I feel this is more of a Republican thing than Democratic thing because of how significant the sexual assault accusations against Kavanaugh affected them. They are still seething over all that because they felt as though they were forced to address something other than Kavanaugh’s policies, which they love. They had to address things about his character that happened when he was significantly younger man. So, in their eyes, to kavanaugh someone is to attack someone’s character when political reality puts you in a losing situation.
But there’s another way to look at kavanaughing. And that’s from the Republican standpoint. To kavanaugh from the GOP’s standpoint is to reference what happened to Kavanaugh as kind of an updated version of “waving the bloody flag” that happened in post-Civil War America. Whenever someone got in a bind, they would tout their courage in the Civil War.
So, for Republicans, kavanaugh is code for the Democrats going after someone not on policy, but on character. But in the specific instance of Trump, they want to switch out policy for facts. Their message to Republicans is this exactly what happened to Kavanaugh. We won that battle, so we can win this one.
I guess they can win. They seem to win every other battle. But there are two issues for Republicans like Newt and Graham going forward. One is that Trump is likely to go completely bonkers and the other is policy is not fact. Facts are harder to deny and harder to spin as a simple disagreement. When you start denying facts that are provable and equating whistleblowers with women accusing someone of character flaws you got a massive messaging problem ahead of you.
It’s easy to get an angry, white middle-aged man feeling “economic anxiety” that a young Kavanaugh sexually assaulting someone is just another attempt by “woke” #MeToo radicals out to ruin the career of someone whose thought on abortion they disagree with. It’s a lot more difficult — but hardly impossible — to tell that same angry white middle aged man that a whistleblower documenting “light treason” on the part of the president as an adult is the same thing.
I dunno. This is now the biggest political crisis in American history since late 1860. I have no idea what is going to happen. Republicans are going to ride the Trump Train all the way down to a Singularity. So, in that sense, they’re likely to win from a long-term strategic standpoint. All they care about is power for power’s sake. Their first task is to acquit Trump in the Senate. Their next step is to get him re-elected using whatever means necessary.
Once he’s safe in his second term, then they can sit back and relax. They can start fighting over who’s the biggest racist or misogynist. They can begin to jockey for their position in the Politburo. There are at least six would-be God King Trumps lusting after the throne. And those guys have to get past Don Jr. and Ivanka first.
In normal times, Republicans would have a reasonable case to make that given how close we are to the 2020 election that we should “let the people decide” Trump’s fate.
Alas, we are not in normal times.
Can lose an election if it’s not free-and-fair.
Remember, the whole reason why Trump is in trouble is that 24 hours after he got an effective pardon due to the “bad optics” of Mueller’s testimony to Congress, he was on the phone with Ukraine looking for dirt on Biden. So, if we let Trump off so the “people” can decide, it may be a Russian person who makes the decision.
What’s more, this is another attempt to move the goalposts because if Trump wins the election on strictly Constitutional grounds — that is the actual humans who make up the Electoral College vote for him, no matter why — then they will say Trump won legally and why we even talking about this anymore.
Or, put another way, election meddling is obviously Trump’s thing. It’s his jam. Why give him a THIRD chance to fuck with an election? Why not let the people decide through their elected representatives as is stated in the Constitution?
Unless someone, somewhere, starts showing some courage, it looks like that’s exactly what is going to happen. Moscow Mitch blocks a trial in the Senate and Trump gets off so he can rig the 2020 election. Remember, Republicans no longer believe in liberal democracy and crave power for power’s sake.
If Trump turns the United States into a Russian-style “managed democracy” after the 2020 election, it’s a win for Republicans. And, really, the only potential flaw in this long-term strategy is Trump may go bonkers during the process that leads up to him having a 10 minute trial in the Senate.
I take Mitch McConnell’s threats to derail any attempt to have a impeachment trial in the Senate very, very, very seriously. He has proven himself to be an astonishingly destructive Constitutional force and all things being equal, he’s got about a 99% chance of coming out on top.
But for one thing….Donald Trump.
Now, it is imperative that we impeach and convict Trump as quickly as possible. As I’ve said for three years now, he’s an existential threat to the Republic. And, in a sense, both he and Moscow Mitch are more avatars for how fucked up things are in the States than they are any sort of evil on a personal level.
What I mean is, if it wasn’t them fucking up everything else, it would be someone else. The Republican Party on an institutional level no longer believes in liberal democracy and so fuck you. So, in a sense, if Trump survives, then the last vestiges of the Republic fall aside. We are simply a Russian-style managed democracy and that’s that. Republicans flip a switch on the existing ICE camp infrastructure and people like me conveniently “vanish.”
That’s got about a 99% chance of happening at this point, matter how much liberals may think we “finally got” Trump.
That sole percent is a powerful one, however. Trump is so bad at his job, so erratic and such a monumental self-own artist that there’s a 1% chance that by the time the issue of impeachment finally get to the Republicans, the possibility of bringing down Trump won’t be a liberal fever dream. It will be a force of history.
We’re likely to know one way another how things are going to sort out when Trump actually is formally impeached. If he finally cracks under the pressure then, well, oooooooh boy.
But don’t get your hopes up just yet. Sometimes, the bad guys win and you just have to figure out how you’re going to survive.
I don’t know what’s going on with the two major Anglophonic democracies right now, but someone needs to to the LHC on and off again or something. But let’s step away from the ginormous clusterfuck that is whatever it is that’s going on in the United States right now.
I dunno.
The limeys across the pond also have a crisis coming to a head. As I understand it the other blond fascist doofus in charge of an Anglophonic democracy is now challenging the Queen to fire him. He’s not so much challenging the Queen to fire him, he’s really threatening the very existence of the Monarchy itself. The moment she does it — and I think she will — she becomes exactly what she’s work so hard not to be: a political figure.
Once she’s a political figure, then Brexiters will want to get rid of her and Remainers will want to keep her. And, really, there’s one simply solution to all of this — abolish the Monarchy. I simply don’t know enough to give you any opinion that isn’t simply for entertainment value, but it seems the moment she does fire Boris, her fate is sealed.
It’s eerie that things seem to be careening to a solution on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s likely to happen by Halloween, too. If I hadn’t gone through three years of Trump, I would be naive enough to believe firing Johnson might be just the catharsis needed to balm the problems in Great Britain. More likely, the bolts are going to pop off. I don’t know, I just don’t know. It definitely seems as though the Brits are careening towards a solution, I just struggle to figure out what it is and exactly what it will look like.
At least in the States, we’re beginning to have some sense of the crisis going down a well-trod path. That Trump will panic enough to attempt to pin the blame on Rick Perry of all people is all anyone needs to know the state of things right now. I don’t know what’s going on, but there definitely does seem to be some sort of direction towards an endgame in both the States and the UK.
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