Category Archives: current events

Hmmmm…

I just watched President Trump’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, repeatedly quote from an impartial, unimpeachable constitutional expert who says this impeachment is illegal– his co-counsel Alan Dershowitz.  Yesterday, Kenneth Starr, architect of the Clinton impeachment, argued about the danger of partisan impeachments like the one against Trump, and the dodgy, unconstitutional standard of Abuse of Power, although it was at the center of the impeachment he engineered in 1998. [1]  

Now, apparently, Senate Republicans working closely with Trump’s defense team, are worried about the increased possibility of an actual partial impeachment trial– rather than opening and closing arguments, a session of questions from Senators and a quick vote to acquit the eternally victimized innocent president before the State of the Union next week.

Only in America, folks.

 

[1] These two lawyers, Dershowitz and Starr, by the way, were the top-shelf attorneys who got that excellent deal for Jeffery Epstein a decade ago, a slap on the wrist for employing under-age “prostitutes” (he gave them money).

Trump Ephemera

In our current age of in-your-pocket/in-your-face instant, disposable communication, traditional written documents are relied on less and less in daily life.   If you want to test how little a written page is regarded by most people today, try writing a letter to somebody.   Put it in an envelope, mail it.   In my recent experience, it is rare to ever hear more than a peep about it, if that.

It’s a shame that quickly thumbed, highly opinionated, disposable smartphone ephemera has largely replaced good writing in public discourse.   The famously short American consumer attention span is shorter than ever before, and growing shorter all the time.    The published statements of public figures like Churchill, Gandhi, FDR, Nixon, Goebbels live on.   They are printed on paper for the ages, available to scholars, historians and everybody else.   Not so with a text, email or tweet, which serves its immediate purpose and is quickly forgotten, lost in a massive haystack of such disposable communications.  

Check out the Hitlerian overtones of this one, part of a long tweet stream by the president of the United States, from last April, less than a year ago.  The echoes should be noted, and they deserve to be remembered.   Shot off right after AG Barr exonerated Trump of all wrong-doing in connection with accepting sweeping and systematic Russian help to win in 2016, with making sure insufficient evidence of “collusion” reached the Special Counsel and for his numerous attempts to thwart the investigation itself.   Trump tweeted “complete and total exoneration!” denounced the “big fat waste” of time and millions of dollars and ended on this ominous note:

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A favorite trope of Mr. Hitler and his followers was turning the tables on the “November Criminals” the sick and traitorous Jews and socialists who were forced to sign the humiliating and punitive German surrender on behalf of the military in November 1918.   The generals would not be tarred with that defeat, it was, the right wing story went, the goddamned sick and dangerous Jews and socialists who “stabbed undefeated Germany in the back.”  The popular justice often proposed for these treacherous traitors, shouted often in enthusiastic rallies of humiliated, angry Germans, was to “hang them from lamp posts.”  

Nothing to worry about here, of course, in our great democracy, with its exquisite system of checks and balances, ensuring that a tyrant will never be able to seize power here.

Here are a couple of the president’s many tweets, at random, from today, which should be reassuring:

 

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… America, America, God shed His grace on thee…

… and shit…

As the President’s Defense Begins

The president’s defense is that even if he did exactly what has been shown over the course of several days of opening arguments by his hated enemies, supported by the cherry-picked sworn testimony of anti-Trump members of the Deep State– traitorous career “diplomats” and their ilk– and so-called “corroborating” video clips of the president and his most powerful advisors — it does not amount to a crime, nor, by definition, anything serious enough to merit any kind of detailed fact-finding trial in the Senate.   The President’s position is that even if his irrationally enraged enemies in Congress manage to “prove” their case, which they can’t because they are all traitors and liars and don’t follow the law so their arguments are all false and invalid — it is not a case that merits impeachment, let alone removal from office.

Every American accused of a crime (or a high crime and misdemeanor) is entitled to a vigorous defense at trial.   Defense lawyers must cast reasonable doubt on the facts in evidence and the testimony of the witnesses to get acquittal for their client.  The appearance of a fair process is crucial to integrity of our legal system.  

If a judge has some connection to the case that gives any appearance that she might take one side or another, she must recuse herself, even if the suspicious looking connection is innocent.   The standard for recusal is an “appearance of impropriety”.   The same is true for the jurors, anyone with an interest in convicting or acquitting the accused, or an expressed prejudice, may not sit in judgment on the case.   That’s why the Senators who are acting as jurors in the impeachment had to take an oath to be impartial and uphold the constitution.

The accused never has any say about (let alone control of) the conduct of the legal proceedings.  The unalterable procedures that ensure due process for all accused citizens are part of our law.   In certain cases (as in overtly racist trials down south back in the day– and in some places to this day) the outcome is a certainty before the first bit of evidence is presented during the trial, but American law strives to avoid this kind of openly unfair trial today.   If active prejudice is involved in a conviction, and can be shown on appeal, it is grounds for overturning the verdict.   There is no such appeal in an impeachment trial, making it even more important that all relevant evidence and witness testimony is presented and carefully examined by the jury at the trial.

In the present impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump, the head juror and trier of fact has announced, ahead of the trial, that he will work in close coordination [1] with the defendant’s defense team for a speedy acquittal, since once again, treason is afoot and the extremist opposition party, motivated by unreasoning hatred of an innocent man, is a lynch mob that must be stopped.  

The position of the president’s party toward impeachment is identical to their unified stand after the Special Counsel’s investigation of Russian influence on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 campaign (“sweeping and systematic” and ongoing) and the detailed description of Presidential Obstruction of Justice.  Their narrative is that the traitorous Mueller team was so twisted by their hatred of one innocent man that they contorted themselves to find no grounds to exonerate him for obstruction of justice!  Other members of the impeachment jury have also publicly committed to a speedy acquittal for the persecuted president.  No need for witnesses the defendant has been blocking from testifying, no need for any further evidence from anyone.  If it’s Shifty Adam Schitt, you must acquit!

OK, fine, everybody knows the deal.   The accused, the most powerful man in the world, has tremendous power over these elected officials of the Senate majority party who are now sitting in judgment at his impeachment trial.  He is the leader of their party.  He can destroy disloyal, “impartial” jurors’ chances for reelection by denying them campaign funds from the RNC, if he were that kind of vengeful person.   He can publicly mock them, instantly expose them to ridicule — a dangerous thing for any politician– if he were that kind of mean guy.  He can publicly and privately bully them, if he was inclined to bully people.  He could even invite reprisals against disloyal members of his party, if he was that kind of angry person.

Thankfully, the president is a very stable genius, an extremely stable genius.   Nothing to worry about here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

A complete, very, very short summary of Mr. Trump’s legal defense in the impeachment trial is here.

 

 

[1]  This pre-coordination neatly fits the definition of criminal conspiracy, not to mention violation of a sworn vow (perjury) to act as impartial jurors, Mitch.

Moscow Mitch’s Secret Trial

I’ve been refraining from directly writing about politics lately.   It is sickening to watch the zero-sum fascistic blood sport it has become.   The arguments are beginning in the Senate today about whether opening arguments must be conducted until after midnight on back to back days and whether any evidence at all will be allowed at the trial.   I start wondering, again, what country I am living in.   Koch country, I suppose, this is the autocracy these born-wealthy, earth-destroying autocrats have long dreamed of and worked hard for.

I heard a sound bite from the fair and impartial head of the 51-49 Suck It Senate, Mitch McConnell, who is busy coordinating with the defendant and his lawyers, organizing a show trial designed to quickly acquit America’s Greatest Fraudster. The McConnell quote was him telling supporters about the greatest moment of his political life. Mitch’s proud evocation of his greatest dramatic moment of extra-constitutional triumph got to me.

The peak experience, McConnell said, was when he looked President Obama in the face, during an exchange about the president’s duty to appoint a replacement for a Supreme Court justice who died during the president’s tenure, and without using the n-word or anything in any way impolite, said (I’m paraphrasing) “fuck you, nigger.”  No nomination, no hearing, no nothing, fuck you, I wish you were never born in Kenya, you Muslim bastard.

I’m not saying Mitch is a racist, or a “Birther”.  I have no idea.  Would he have said the same to Bill Clinton?  Probably (that libertine draft-dodging fucker got BLOWJOBS!), though the time would not have been right yet for such a brazen and extra-legal power play — it took 8 years of Cheney, and then 8 of Obama, before angry partisan division would get that openly ripe.  So ripe that a trial without witnesses and evidence, conducted partly late at night on consecutive days so it can be wrapped up as quickly as possible, sounds reasonable to about 40% of our countrymen.

Mitch’s behavior is just the traditional southern way, I suppose, the smug superiority of wealthy white people (traditionally men) long used to having their way.   Powerful white men presided over quick trials whose fore-ordained outcomes were always black and white, men who identified with these all-powerful men sat on the juries, beholden to their bosses.   Black defendant alleged to have attacked a white?   Guilty.   White defendant being harassed and dragged into court on flimsy evidence for supposedly just basically touching a Negro?   Come on, boys, there’s no need for witnesses or supposed evidence here, nor any jury deliberations neither.  Let’s get this done toot sweet and go have lunch, what you boys say?

So it is with the impeachment trial.  The president did exactly what he is accused of — mounted an organized campaign to pressure the new president of an ally dependent on American aid during an ongoing war, to make the Ukrainian president announce that Trump’s possible opponent in the next presidential election was the subject of a Ukrainian corruption probe.   The perfect phone call to the Ukrainian president on July 25 was merely one chapter in this long and ongoing campaign that involved several of the president’s closest circle and went on for at least three months, until the confirmed report of the Whistleblower complaint became public.   The record of the July 25 call was immediately locked in a secret server by alarmed aides and attorneys, because that’s what democratic governments always do with perfect calls.  

Trump abused his power for personal gain and obstructed the investigation by Congress, as he had successfully obstructed the Mueller investigation.  Mueller’s investigation led to a few perjury convictions for close associates of Trump and a conclusion of no triable criminal conspiracy, because Mueller found “insufficient evidence” to show every element of such a conspiracy.   He also wrote a second volume detailing the president’s successful obstruction and explicitly did not exonerate him of the serious crime of obstruction of justice, a pattern of corrupt behavior intended to conceal guilt and destroy evidence of the underlying criminal enterprise.

Enter Trump’s new attorney general, conservative extremist Bill Barr, longtime defender of the president’s absolute authority (almost Pope-like in his infallibility, according to the Bagpiper) who gave him the legal means to delay testimony and documents in any investigation from ever being allowed until, at minimum, a year or so from now when the courts would ultimately rule on the unprecedented (and ridiculous) claim of absolute immunity under the most audaciously dodgy, extreme version of Executive Privilege.  A claim Barr explicitly, publicly and notoriously urged Trump to make in his letter of May, 8, 2019.

Now, one of the president’s lawyers, Patrick Philbin, is using the phrase “ram this through” over and over to characterize the Democratic request for a vote on an amendment to McConnell’s special impeachment rules to allow for the introduction of documentary evidence and witnesses.   Any lawyer asking for this on the first day of a trial, Philbin insists, would have his case thrown out of court and probably be sanctioned by the judge.  Imagine asking for evidence at a trial?!!   What kind of pettifogging scumbag would ask a judge for that?   To allow this kind of partisan bullshit to suddenly change the rules of trials would forever destroy the integrity of our democratic system.

Yes, indeed.  If the president had something to hide WOULDN’T HE BE HIDING IT?  

The People rest.

 

Question of Fact

I find myself thinking of the good advice to juries and judges, given by Brett “Boof” Kavanaugh’s mother, who went to law school during Boof’s childhood and became a lawyer and then a judge herself.  “Use your common sense — what smells right and what smells like a steaming pile of shit?”  ( I paraphrase).

We’re living in a sound byte and “Social Media” driven, 51-49 SUCK IT, LOSER culture where fact finders are not expected to use common sense after smelling various claims to determine which come closest to making sense.   

Remarks are often taken out of context, edited, framed a certain way, weaponized and offered as doctored proof of the unreliability of things we used to call “facts”, back in the days when we naively believed that what actually happens is more important than the self-serving reframing of reality by highly paid spin doctors.   We are told everything today is strictly tribal, EVERYTHING, and what you believe depends 100% on whether you are a member of the tribe of loyal winners or the tribe of despicable fucking losers.   

As a member of a lost tribe, I find myself recalling times in my own life when I was expected to accept, for the sake of somebody else’s strong, immovable feelings, an absurd or incoherent story.    An innocent remark of mine was sharpened and used to vicious effect in a marriage counseling session as proof that my oldest friend, the husband, was a fucking liar.  His occasional lying never bothered me, nor did I ever agree with the wife that he is a compulsive liar.  Yet, there it is: that he’s an unbearable fucking liar proved by his oldest friend’s candid, strategically quoted remark!   

My old friend confronted me, as he was challenged to do by his wife and couples therapist and, eyelid twitching, put it to me bluntly: “Did you intentionally and viciously try to destroy my marriage or was it just stupidity driven by unconscious hostility?”   I suggested a third choice, which I explained in detail, but, also — what the fucking fuck?!

Granted, to a larger and more open extent than ever before, we are living in a 51-49 SUCK IT, LOSER! culture.   The stories and rationales will keep shifting, polls will be taken, retaken, new stories and rationales will emerge about the same thing explained differently the day before.   Denials will be followed by insistence that nothing was ever denied, admissions, same deal, they can be made and denied in back to back breaths because: SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!   

As long as the insula is kept glowing red, there is no need to go beyond the immediate cause of anger (which makes the insula glow).  In fact, when we are angry we are physically and psychologically unable to see the other side of anything, we literally cannot process the explanations that would otherwise pacify us.  The beauty of righteous rage: it makes us feel totally righteous and adrenalized to fight injustice.

If you hate, you will be inclined to easily believe the worst rumors about the person/people you hate.   Hillary Clinton, an internet meme insisted, was running a pedophile emporium in the basement of a popular DC pizza joint.  Child sex slaves, locked up in the basement for pervert Hillary supporters to do with as they pleased.  An outraged citizen arrived at the pizza place with a gun to liberate the poor children in the basement.   The pizza place had no basement.  They arrested the guy with the loaded gun and, thankfully, nobody was harmed.   The claim turned out to be a piece of random propaganda against a political candidate who was either the first or second most hated politician in America at the time (Trump and Hillary were said to be one/two most hated presidential candidates ever, I don’t recall the order).

During that same ugly 2016 campaign I got a call from a friend who told me about a video tape of Sheldon Adelson (piece of shit extraordinaire) and Donald Trump (his record reeks for itself) that allegedly showed them gang-banging a 13 year-old girl.  As much as I dislike both of these creatures, I immediately knew the story was a crock.  Use your common sense: assume either of them actually had sex with a 13 year-old — in what universe would they do it together, sharing the girl — and the possibility of a very long prison term?   It’s not in either of their characters to share. 

Beyond that, how would these two wealthy men, skilled in covering up dark things they feel need to be kept secret, have allowed a video to reach the public?   The videographer would be either well-paid off and sworn to secrecy in an ironclad NDA or discreetly removed from the world, along with the “evidence” of the sensational gang rape of a minor.  The corporate media would be abuzz about it, if such a tape had surfaced or there had been the slightest whiff of truth about its existence.

Believe what you like, it’s certainly your prerogative, like the choice to remain unpersuadable.  For me, I prefer to have as much solid information as I can get before I formulate and state my position.   It’s like being a juror in a criminal trial, you want to hear from what they used to call “fact witnesses”, as many people who were actually at the crime scene as you can get, and see as much other evidence as there is, before you make up your mind about what happened and what didn’t happen and who did what and so on.  Dismiss that principle as “tribal” if you like, I’ll stick with it, prejudiced member of a loser tribe that I am.

 

Psychological vs. Physical torture

I had a friend, a tortured soul, who’d routinely describe any mildly unpleasant experience as “pure torture”.   Never once, that I recall, was this torture physical.  It was that psychological torture most of us are familiar with, the kind we must endure from time to time in a life that sometimes contains insoluble frustrations.   Psychological torture  can become unbearable, no question about it.   Sometimes the answer to unbearable frustration, from the point of view of people in power, is to torture those who would torture us.   Torture and full-scale infrastructure demolishing military invasions, instead of smart, targeted law enforcement–  indictment, capture, trial– you know, the marks of a civilized response to intolerable crimes against humanity.   The impulse to torture is some sick, primitive, lizard-brained shit, if you think about it.  Once resurrected and tolerated it becomes a feature, rather than a disgusting bug to extinguish once and forever.

After the brilliantly executed terrorist masterpiece of 9/11 the world suddenly seemed a terrifying place.   You’re sitting in your office and a giant plane smashes through the window, turning the building into a crematorium.   On the internet you watch the filmed beheadings of people innocent of anything but being hated by these same terrorists.  These maniacs, many at the time believed, will come to your house and slit your throat in your bed.  In those extraordinarily terrifying days, extraordinary measures were called for.  Cue the cynical public servants and their ambitious, ass-licking lawyers.    I’ll let Amy Goodman and her brother David take it for a moment, from their 2006 book Static [1]:

When the eulogy for American democracy is written, this will stand out as a signal achievement:  how an American president and vice president championed torture, how Congress acquiesced, how the courts provided legal cover for the sadists, all the while sage media pundits politely debated our descent into barbarism.

[2]

These are the last words of their chapter on the Bush/Cheney torture regime.  About psychological torture specifically, they write, quoting historian Alfred McCoy’s interview with Amy:

“The second major breakthrough that the CIA had came in New York City at Cornell University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under contract from the CIA studied Soviet KGB torture techniques.  They found that the most effective KGB technique was self-inflicted pain.  You simply make somebody stand for a day or two.  As they stand — you’re not beating them, they have no resentment — you tell them, ‘You’re doing this to yourself.  Cooperate with us and you can sit down.’  As they stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt, they separate hallucinations start, the kidneys shut down.”

Through a process of trial and error, the CIA refined its methods by experimenting with a variety of torture techniques, from beating, to secretly giving American soldiers hallucinogenic drugs.  “LSD certainly didn’t work — you scramble the brain.  You got unreliable information,” said McCoy.  “But what did work was the combination of these two boring, rather mundane behavioral techniques: sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain.”

The CIA codified its findings in 1963 in the KUBARK Counter-intelligence Manual (which can be found online).  McCoy noted that KUBARK presented a “distinctly American form of torture, the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries — psychological torture… it’s proved to be a very resilient, quite adaptable and an enormously destructive paradigm.”

It is a mistake to consider psychological torture — sometimes referred to as “torture lite” — to be the lesser of evils.  “People who are involved in treatment tell us [that psychological torture] is far more destructive, does far more lasting damage to the human psyche, than does physical torture,” insisted McCoy.  Even Senator John McCain stated when he was advocating his torture prohibition in 2005 that he would rather be beaten than psychologically tortured.     [3]

My sister and I were raised by a father who (I learned toward the end of his life) had been brutally tortured as an infant and child.   The regular torture he was subjected to was both physical and psychological.   He was able to exert himself as a father not to inflict physical torture on my sister and me, something I applaud him for posthumously.   The psychological torture he was generally unable to refrain from inflicting.   So I write on this subject with some personal experience and strong feelings about it.  Torture leaves lifelong wounds — even the relatively mild forms of torture I experienced.   My sister still blames herself for the damage that was done to her.  One of the devilries of psychological torture is how it undermines your trust in your own perceptions.

You can shrug off torture done in our names, to strangers who may or may not be terrorists, as you can shrug off many terrible things you can do nothing about.   Why am I starting the new year writing about fucking torture?  A lesson from history, I suppose [4].  2006 is history now, although largely forgotten in our frenzied and fearfully competitive commercial culture, and Amy and David Goodman’s reporting was a first draft of history, and a chilling one.  The efforts undertaken in our name, on the Dark Side, as the personification of righteous evil Dick Cheney famously scowled it on national TV, casts a dark shadow across our culture today.  Ignore it at all of our perils, boys and girls.

After the slaughter of innocents on 9/11, DOJ lawyers John Yoo (tenured professor of Constitutional Law — of all things– at UC-Berkeley) and  Jay Bybee (lifetime tenured federal judge), got busy writing the now infamous (and generally forgotten) Torture Memo, the legal arguments for why America was entitled to use torture against its enemies.  Yoo had the brilliant insight to redefine pain, using a definition he found somewhere, and then to redefine torture as only that which causes the severe and unbearable pain that immediately precedes death.  

The definitions are key, in the law.   A prisoner of war may not be tortured, under international law, but what about an “enemy combatant” or a “detainee”?   Not exactly covered by those pesky Geneva Conventions.  Plus, since the treatment didn’t rise to the level of pain accompanying organ failure, it wasn’t torture, it was now “enhanced interrogation.”   See?  Let “bleeding heart” journalists and other lawyers find our secret memo and fight it out in court.  Fuck ’em.  

Like the neurologists the CIA hired in the early 1960s to create a manual of effective psychological torture (effective, we should note, in breaking the captive’s spirit, not in gaining actual intelligence) Cheney, Addington, Bush and co., soon after 9/11/01, hired two psychologists to create a new “enhanced interrogation techniques” program.   The EIT was based on the theory of learned helplessness.  You teach your captive that he or she is helpless.  You do this by creating debility, dependence and despair.  

There are many techniques.  You can deprive them of sleep for long periods, make them almost freeze, or almost parboil, chain them in stressful positions, lock them in coffins, slam them against walls, gag them on a board, turn them upside down and pour water into their mouths to simulate their drowning.  None of this is torture, by the way, if go by the legalistic Torture Memo and you are an insane fucking sadist on a mission from God. 

The creators of the EIT program, two psychologists, Jessen and Mitchell, were paid $80,000,000 to reverse engineer the SERE Manual (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) used to train Navy SEALS to resist giving up information under actual torture by savage enemies without the foresight and legal chops to set up an EIT program.   $80,000,000 tax payer dollars, boys and girls, for an American torture program that never worked.  Of course, its defenders say it saved countless innocent lives, but they are torturers and their words must be considered as such, however clever their lawyers’ reframing of torture may have been.

There was a study conducted and a massive report written on the extensive EIT program.  The report was compiled over several years, throughout the Obama administration.  The details of the inhuman things Americans and our allies did to “detainees” are sickening, the conclusion that torture does not work in terms of gaining useful information was unequivocal.   The highly redacted report on the most recent CIA torture program was classified, of course, never released to the public.  The summary of the report, which was reported on, was also heavily redacted. It was all very controversial, made America look very bad in hindsight.  Obama didn’t want it released, after all, he was “looking forward not backwards” and had already candidly stated, without any attempt to prettify it, that we “tortured some folks.”  That mea culpa was not enough?   Some very good people, with the best of intentions, did some bad things and some folks got “tortured.”   What more is there to say?  It’s like the banning of the n-word.   Stop people from saying the word in public and “bingo!” no more fucking racism.

Debility, dependence and despair.  It has been achieved on a massive scale, both here and abroad.   The number of American deaths of despair continues to rise.   The world is catching on fire, flooding, cracking open, the oceans are rising, swallowing coastlines.  Globalism has removed any trace of restraint from the corporations that run the planet, many of them hastening the end of the natural world by their heedless pursuit of the “bottom line”.  We are helpless against these forces, as we learn every day.  We depend on the massive international system that delivers our food, our water, our clothing and so forth.  Our only hope, we are told, is consuming things, while we can still get ’em.

Do not despair.  There are far better things to learn than helplessness.   The first task, it seems to me, is to see things as clearly as possible.  Facts exist, honest, they do.  The pain accompanying the shut down of a major organ is not the mark of what is fucking torture and what is not torture.   We live under the whims of a constantly enraged two-year old at the moment, here in the greatest and most exceptional nation God and or history ever created (among others who make the same claim), he serves the small group who already has it all, giving them more, taking from the least of us, but we must not despair.   There is much work to be done.   Time to get busy.

A friend said, when this insane, unfunny clown was elected president, fair and square by 78,000 surgically targeted votes that gave him the Electoral College, that we must remain vigilant.  These motherfuckers have made it extremely hard to remain vigilant, their cynical shit-flinging and “cult of personality” ass-licking is painful to watch.   But vigilant we must remain.

Do not despair.  There is much work to be done.  Time to get busy.  Here’s to a happy 2020, everybody.

 

[1]  Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back, Amy Goodman and David Goodman (c) 2006

[2] page 167

[3] pp. 161-2

[4]  I’ve also been intending to transcribe these passages from Static for a while now.  No time like the new year.

Democracy in Action

Mitch McConnell:  “Everything I do during this I’m coordinating with White House counsel, there will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to  handle this.  There’s no chance the president will be removed from office.”   The “Grim Reaper” on FOX News.

On (Lying) Face the Nation, Lindsey Graham was asked “Should Republicans in the Senate really be taking their marching orders from the person being investigated?”

Graham:  “You know, I understand the president’s frustration, but I think what’s best for the country is to get this thing over with, I have clearly made up my mind.    I’m not trying to hide the fact that I have disdain for the accusations and the process.”

Way to answer a question, Lindsey!

These staunch Trump supporting men know “it’s a witch hunt, it’s a scam, it’s a hoax… illegal, unconstitutional, it’s a very bad thing for our country … it trivializes impeachment.”    Their leader told them so, over and over, on television.   And, as we all know, furhrerworte haben Gesetzkraft — the leader’s word has the force of law.

USA!  USA!!!

Quick Timeline of Trump’s attempted shakedown of Zelensky

Using the word “shakedown” in the title gives away my position on what I believe Mr. Trump did.  The president’s attempt to get a foreign leader to announce a corruption investigation into the son of his political rival is the only impeachable offense the fearful Democrats charged Mr. Trump with.   It was bad that Trump held up aid to Ukraine for at least two months, and released it only after the whistleblower’s complaint (submitted a month and a half earlier) finally brought the matter to the attention of our Checks and Balances.   It was two more weeks before the original whistleblower complaint was released, and Trump unaccountably released the “transcript” of the hidden July 25th perfect call.  Now they are impeaching Mr. Trump over that shakedown plan, which included acts within his powers, like dismissing an ambassador who stood in the way of the mischief of Trump’s personal lawyer and the other two amigos.

Limiting the impeachment to only that — and obstruction of the hated Congress (which nobody cares about) —  takes a lot of other important high crimes and misdemeanors off the table.   I suppose the theory is to err on the side of caution, make a clear and convincing case for the most open and egregious story or abuse of power for a corrupt purpose, easily understood, and have that stand in for the rest.  

I’d have preferred at least one more, for obstruction of justice.  Let him refute Mueller’s entire volume two, that would be good.   Limiting the impeachment to this single series of despicable act takes Don McGahn and the rest of the fact witnesses Mueller talked to, under oath, about the president’s seamless pattern of obstruction of justice, off the table.  It also sets the stage for Lindsay Graham to call Hunter Biden, Adam Schiff and Gerald Nadler as hostile witnesses in the Senate trial before McConnell allows an up or down straight majority party line vote to not remove the leader they all defer to, the man who controls the RNC purse strings.   Senate Republicans will have the final word, per the rules, on all procedural decisions during their impeachment trial.

That said, here is the timeline (facts) of how long the appropriated military aid to Ukraine was held up (at least from July 3 to September 11), when it was released (September 11) and why (treason by so-called “whistleblower”).

The source for this timeline is lying NBC.  All quotes are from the article linked here.

July 3, 2019:  A hold is placed on the almost $400,000,000 in bipartisan, mostly military, aid to Ukraine.   July 3 is when Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman learns of the aid being withheld.

July 10:  

A meeting at the White House with Ukrainian officials is cut short when Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, says he has an agreement with the acting White House chief of staff that Ukraine’s president would get a meeting with Trump if Ukraine agreed to launch investigations.

Then-national security adviser John Bolton “stiffened” and ended the meeting, later telling colleague Fiona Hill to report it to the National Security Council’s lawyer, she testified.

“I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and (acting White House chief of staff Mick) Mulvaney are cooking up on this,” Hill said Bolton told her.

July 18:  White House Office of Management and Budget announces presidential order to hold up aid to Ukraine.

July 25:  Mr. Trump’s perfect call to Volodymyr Zelensky.

AUGUST: The questions

Catherine Croft, the special adviser for Ukraine at the State Department, says two Ukrainians reach out to her to ask about the status of the military assistance. She told lawmakers she couldn’t recall the exact dates, but believes the outreach took place before the Aug. 28 publication of a Politico article detailing the hold.

August 12, 2019:  Whistleblower complaint about withholding of aid to Ukraine and concerns about “perfect” July 25 phone call filed.  DOJ does not forward complaint to Congress, as required by law.  (It gets to Congress on September 25, 2019, weeks after House investigations begin.)

August 28: Politico publishes article on the withheld aid.

August 29:  acting US Ambassador to Ukraine begins getting desperate calls from Ukrainians about the withholding of aid.

SEPT. 9: The investigations begin

Three House committees launch a wide-ranging investigation into the allegations that Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and possibly others, tried to pressure the Ukrainian government to help the president’s reelection campaign by digging up dirt on a political rival.

September 11: most of the appropriated aid to Ukraine is released.

September 25:  August 12 whistleblower complaint released to Congress.

December 13, 2019:  Democrats deliberately time their vote for Friday the Thirteenth to approve two baseless, partisan articles of impeachment against the president AG William Barr has repeatedly called innocent and totally justified to be enraged by the sneaky unscrupulousness of his many enemies.  

Thank you and have a very nice day.