If your goal is to destroy the administrative state, end all regulation and stop the enforcement of coercive laws that protect only the poor, those demanding and parasitic “takers”, while ensuring maximum liberty for the most privileged to enjoy the unfettered pursuit of happiness, the shambolic [1] Mr. Trump is the perfect president  for you.  Mr. Trump, shameless showman and all-star sower of chaos, is the perfect president for those interested only in preserving, or enhancing, their own vast privilege.   

Trump’s manifest lifelong unconcern with law, rules and norms, his constant pursuit of self-interest above everything else, his mania for “winning”, coupled with his very limited attention span,  makes him the perfect man for the job.   His inattention to detail is catnip for those who have specific targets of  attack to cripple the impediments to their complete freedom from government coercion.  He is always happy to do nothing, if it benefits his biggest donors.   The devil in any regulatory scheme is in the details, as any high-stakes white collar criminal knows, so create enough havoc and certain key details will get lost in the shuffle.  Leave open appointments for agency heads, don’t fill government jobs as they become vacant, employ acting-directors so as not to require Senate confirmation, and so on. 

For example, we learn (from the excellent investigative podcast Trump Inc.) that the Federal Election Commission is currently unable to enforce federal campaign finance law.  All the perfect president has had to do to ensure this is nothing.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an independent regulatory agency whose purpose is to enforce campaign finance law in United States federal elections. Founded in April 1975, after adoption of the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act, the Washington, D.C. based agency employed 339 Americans as of 2006 and, as of 2017, an annual budget of $79,000,000.  Its six commissioners, three from each major party, are appointed by the President.      See: Wikipedia

In order to vote to refer a criminal prosecution for violations of campaign finance law, a law the president himself appears to have violated when he was named as Individual One in a campaign finance violation that put his personal lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen in prison, the six commissioners, three Democratic, three Republican, must vote do do so [2].  Republicans have been historically reluctant to bring these complaints to enforce campaign finance laws, which require, at minimum, a quorum of four to vote on.  

There are currently only three FEC commissioners, making it impossible to have a quorum.  No quorum, no vote to enforce the federal campaign finance laws.   So all Trump had to do to ensure that there is no enforcement of federal campaign finance law, and, obviously,  no penalty for its violations, was — nothing.   Which he always does with aplomb.   He has been otherwise very busy, since the day he was inaugurated in 2017, focusing on his reelection campaign and driving huge rally crowds into continual frenzies.

Interesting note: Don McGahn is a former FEC commissioner, nominated by George W. Bush in 2008 and confirmed by the Senate for his six year term.  He was elected FEC chairman soon after his confirmation.   Read all about it:   Here is a  beautiful example of Mr. McGahn’s legal prose, an opinion in a 2013 enforcement case ruling that Trump, Michael Cohen and the Trump organization did absolutely nothing wrong in connection with the 2012 presidential campaign.

As Wikipedia puts it: Due to multiple members resigning and no confirmed replacements, the commission lacks a quorum and cannot conduct most of its regulatory functions.^[5]

Before we get too excited, there is powerful criticism of the FEC, summarized here:

Critics of the FEC, including campaign finance reform supporters such as Common Cause and Democracy 21, have complained that it is a classic example of regulatory capture where it serves the interests of the ones it was intended to regulate. The FEC’s bipartisan structure, which was established by Congress, renders the agency “toothless.” Critics also claim that most FEC penalties for violating election law come well after the actual election in which they were committed. Additionally, some critics claim that the commissioners tend to act as an arm of the “regulated community” of parties, interest groups, and politicians when issuing rulings and writing regulations. Others point out, however, that the commissioners rarely divide evenly along partisan lines, and that the response time problem may be endemic to the enforcement procedures established by Congress. To complete steps necessary to resolve a complaint – including time for defendants to respond to the complaint, time to investigate and engage in legal analysis, and finally, where warranted, prosecution – necessarily takes far longer than the comparatively brief period of a political campaign.

My advice to anyone outraged by the kind of nonchalantly autocratic moves Mr. Trump routinely makes to weaken regulations, oversight and democracy itself, look away, vote for whoever the DNC puts up as a “centrist” presidential candidate.  Nothing you can do about any of it anyway, you powerless, worried citizens, short of doing the near impossible thing of figuring out how to join with others to organize and have a voice.  Just keep looking away.  You’ll hardly feel it when the bottom drops out from under us all.   The world is being destroyed anyway, and will be beyond salvaging shortly at the present rate of destruction, so no worries.

[1]  Just learned this great word from James Risen.  Shambolic:  chaotic, disorganized or mismanaged, (syn: muddled, confused, in total disarray).

[2] National disgrace Bill Barr (who recently joined the line of bagpipers at a police rally, so help me God) made the case against Trump in the Southern District go away, though Cohen, now in federal prison,  was reimbursed the $130,000 he paid porn-star Stormy Daniels in October 2016 (the campaign finance crime) and produced the $130,000 personal check Trump signed in his now familiar jagged Sharpie scrawl to reimburse him for the criminal act.  Oh, well.  That’s the Unitary Executive for you!

The hallmark of autocracy is unquestioning fealty to the unfailing wisdom and absolute power of the autocrat.   If the leader did it, it cannot be wrong.  If the leader said it, it must be the law, in a dictatorship.  That was the express credo and supreme legal principle of the Nazi regime, “the leader’s word is law” to wit:

After his party-line acquittal in the first trial in American history free of witnesses and evidence, the President’s impeachment “trial” in the Senate, the President exercised his legitimate power to punish the civil servants who had complied with legal subpoenas and testified honestly in the impeachment inquiry. 

The purge included the blameless twin brother of Alexander Vindman, one of the officials who gave sworn public testimony that directly contradicted the President’s claim that his 7/25 call to the new president of Ukraine was “perfect” (leaving aside a: what a “perfect call” even means and b: why the only record of the perfect call was hidden in a top secret government server until the Barr-squelched “credible”  and “urgent” Whistleblower complaint became known on September 9th).   

Although the vindictive purge by the President looked like the act of a petulant dictator, the firings were within the absolute right of every head of the Executive Branch, to purge the ranks of his enemies.   No reason to get all morally indignant about that.   Purges happen, the law says it’s fine, everyone in the Executive Branch works “at the pleasure of” their boss, the President, as we all know.

A few days later, late the other night, the President tweeted that the upcoming sentencing of his longtime ally Roger Stone was “horrible” and “very unfair”. 

All Stone had been convicted of, after all, was loyalty to his old friend while the sick and dangerous Democrats were getting a pass on all their many crimes.  Barr’s DOJ, by the way, is conducting criminal investigations into some of these sick bastards, including two sick and dangerous former FBI directors who refused to swear personal loyalty to the President, even when directly asked by the President [1].

Stone was only trying to help the President by lying under oath to federal investigators about his role in Russia’s sweeping and systematic attempt to help Trump eke out a 78,000 vote Electoral College win over an almost equally reviled opponent in the 2016 presidential race.  Where is the crime in that?!!!   Being a loyal friend is now a crime?!  Stone’s open defiance of the judge’s gag order?   He was nervous, because he’s INNOCENT!  What don’t you understand about “very unfair” and “horrible”?!

Asked yesterday, after the unabashedly corrupt Bagpiper Bill Barr’s Justice Department modified their own sentencing memo to the judge in the Stone case, based on the President’s sophisticated legal arguments in his “horrible” and “very unfair” tweet,  the President was asked if he has learned anything from impeachment.   Here is the question and the dumber than a pile of scats fiery red meat response:

Reporter:  What lesson did you learn from impeachment?

POTUS:  That the Democrats are crooked, they’ve got a lot of crooked things going.  That they’re vicious, that they shouldn’t have brought impeachment…

Reporter:   … anything about yourself?   

POTUS:   … and that my poll numbers are ten points higher because of fake news like NBC which reports the news very inaccurately, probably more inaccurately than CNN, if that’s possible, uh, MSDNC, and you’re MS… uh, and if you take a look at NBC… no, I think they’re among the most dishonest reporters of the news.

Case closed.  Trump 2020. 

The mass media (except for FOX, Breitbart, Der Sturmer and a few other reliable outlets) is the Enemy of the People, some very sick and dangerous people lying about truly great Americans while covering up the crimes of other sick and dangerous Democrat traitors!  It is finally almost time to turn the tables and bring justice to these sick and dangerous criminals.

Trump 2020.  Say it with me:  “Fuhrerworte haben Gesetzeskraft, yo.“

[1] The investigation into one, Andrew McCabe, was ended shortly after this post was written, with no finding of an actionable criminal charge.  

Terrible things happen regularly in our world, under the heading of “man’s inhumanity to man.”   At any given time one group of humans are catching hell from another.  For example, in 1921, a group of angry men in Tulsa, Oklahoma decided it was an intolerable outrage that another group of men, men who didn’t look like them, were prosperous while they themselves were struggling economically.   They went on a full-scale rampage, burning down a large section of Tulsa and killing an untold number of the other, hated, ethnic group.  After the pogrom, the survivors of that orgy of destruction, their former fine homes in ruins, were herded into an outdoor holding camp, presumably for their own protection from the still murderous mob.  

We don’t hear much about this particular racist massacre by a group of men who honestly believed they were superior to the people they were slaughtering, and fully justified in their violent actions.  Next year, when the centenary of the massive Tulsa Pogrom comes around, this particular little known slaughter will be placed before the public again. as if for the first time.

We can observe the sickening echoes of history, the sequences of unfolding events that “rhyme” with the most troubling episodes of the past.   We can see a familiar progression before every outpouring of mass rage:  legitimate grievance, harnessed and enflamed by finger-pointing demagogues, an “other” vilified (often as rapists and child murderers) and then, after sufficient time for this malignant brew to fully ferment, the chants begin, torches are lifted, men with guns ride to the rescue, the villains are brought to “justice,” swiftly, violently, without regard to the ordinary niceties for determining guilt or innocence.

It is a human instinct to look away from this kind of horror.   The impulse is understandable, even if it can also be fatal.   Historical comparisons are always slippery, often used to advance supremely idiotic arguments.   Certain things, however, always follow the same pattern.   In times of vast economic insecurity, for example, when massive transnational corporations employ armies of the world’s poorest, at slave wages, to maximize their profit margin, it is predictable that masses of their former decently paid workers, now without the prospect of employment for a fair wage, will rightfully feel betrayed and angry.  Angry people look for somebody to blame.  Demagogues direct their righteous rage towards some historically powerless group, the scoundrels who are to blame for this savage injustice.

It is predictable that when hundred year killer storms become the norm, instead of rare exceptions to the natural order — despite the robust right wing cries of hoax, fraud, lies, hysterical liberal alarmism — people affected by the storms will feel enormous desperation.  Every news report of a deadly tornado in an area that had never seen one, earthquakes in areas that had never had them, another large city flooded by a killer hurricane, landslides, wild fires, drought, rising sea levels causing floods … increases anxiety.  

It’s impossible to fully quell the thought, with the regular front page news of these now frequent natural disasters, that maybe this increasing natural destruction is not all a Chinese hoax invented by evil job-killing enemies who want to destroy our freedom.   The awful thought that maybe a hundred years of man’s wanton pollution has caused this scary change of the climate will creep in from time to time, especially after your own home is destroyed by an aggrieved Mother Nature.

Look away if you must.  Politics has become an ugly blood sport, the instinct to look away is stronger than it’s ever been, by deliberate design of the game.   As you turn your gaze inward to your own life, and making it as good as you can, in spite of the horrors around you, understand that only one side in the tribal wars has been actively and energetically organizing and preparing for this war for decades.  

Right now that side is winning bigly, while the other side cowers, afraid, torn by debate, many of its would be advocates turning away from “politics” and clinging to the things in life that make them feel most comfortable as the terrible rhymes of the worst episodes of history are jangling like ominous, maddeningly loud wind chimes agitated by a killing breeze.

Here in America only one side of our political divide, the extreme right, has organized a methodical long game to “right the scales” in the culture war.   One party now embraces views that, forty years ago, were the unthinkably paranoid, self-interested (and, frankly, racist) magical thinking of extreme fringe fanatics like The John Birch Society  [1].   The well-funded, smartly engineered campaign that created and funded influential “think tanks” to intellectually argue for their preferred public policies and shape national debate, endowed chairs at hundreds of universities for professors who espouse their liberty-loving views, founded, and funded, an influential national society of ambitious young lawyers and law students to ideologically indoctrinate and promote, through a fellow-traveler career ladder, future federal judges who will act as one to advance their agenda, given a case with the wiggle room to do so, funding national “grassroots” campaigns that appear on television to give the appearance of a massive, spontaneous public outcry, really has no analogue on the left. 

The protection of vast financial privilege, inequalities of wealth and grotesquely unequal chances for life or dignity, has long been the project of the privileged.  There is nothing mysterious about this; you or I, if we were cynics, would probably do the same, under these conditions.   If you stand to inherit a billion dollars from the family trust, and the government seeks to claim half of that in a punitive Death Tax, you will donate however many millions you are required to kick in for the cause of keeping it all.

Liberty, in fact, according to this orthodoxy, demands that the government not be allowed to coerce its citizens or unfairly confiscate the rightful property of  citizens.    An army of desperate poor people will be assembled to stand on the mall in Washington D.C. and every other major city and, in one voice, rail against this vicious government intrusion on human freedom!   Give ’em each fifty bucks and a free lunch, pay an additional ten if they make their own signs.   Why not?   That’s democracy in action, after all.   USA!  USA!!!!

The radical right has played a clever long game, learning from its mistakes, tweaking the program like a skilled engineer does to fix bugs in it.  It doesn’t hurt that they have unlimited money to deploy in sustaining their ever more effective long game.  Every beneficiary of the tangible privileges accorded to wealthy followers of the ideology will gladly kick in to advance the agenda for her own children and the children of her children’s children.   This is simply human nature, which you are free to judge, but powerless to do anything about.  

On the progressive side, historically, and presently, we tend to argue from entrenched positions — incremental change advocates (the practical art of the possible) versus institutional change advocates (justice delayed is justice denied).  We have moderates, urging us to not attempt to frontally attack long-time institutional injustices.   We have liberals, telling us that certain intolerable social evils should be reformed, must be reformed, to the extent possible in our divided political culture,  but that it may take a generation or two, or perhaps, as our recent history shows, a century or more.  

We have a few public radicals on the organized left, pointing out, correctly in my view, that the long slide toward autocracy (and bear in mind, the wealthy architects of the right wing revolution, in their hearts, prize their own liberty to be free of social coercion of any kind above everything else– autocracy for all!) cannot be countered with half measures.  We are fighting unscrupulous reactionary radicals, controlling untold wealth, who are busily spending to entrench themselves in permanent power, and only an equal and opposing energy, organizing and willingness to fight can make any difference.

The dilemma in a nation trained from birth to be pliant consumers — if you are appalled by the rapid advance of an extreme right wing agenda, there is really no place you can visit today, and directly participate to fight, that compares to any of the effective and massively well-funded one-stop shops of the formerly radical right.   If you are a young Libertarian, there is an easily findable career network and ready funding, from a variety of sources, for your liberty-enhancing ideas and a group of likeminded idealists ready to welcome you to their ranks.   Young leftists?  Good luck to you finding an organization to work with, finding people to organize, strategize and march with, in your city or town.

So, to the traumatized people of good conscience I know, I understand 100% your revulsion, and the reason you turn away from the ugly spectacle as our nation drops even the pretense of democracy.   It is painful and scary to witness, and a feeling of helpless anger is difficult to sit with.   There are wonderful entertainments to take our minds off this unsettling state of affairs, a host of diverting and excellent, healthy things to do– rather than watch in horror as the dark clouds of autocracy blot out all hopes of the light ever returning.   I get it, absolutely.   

And I will do my best to console you, sickeningly insistent realist (or unhinged, overwrought imaginer) that I am, in the cattle car, on our trip toward the relocation center.   At that point it will be senselessly cruel to remind anyone that all evil needs to flourish is for people of good conscience to look away, to do nothing.   How were you to really know how bad it was actually getting?   The New York Times was not freaking out, that much.

And, more to the point, it is not as if it was our children, or the children of anyone we know, who were snatched from their mothers’ arms and lost in a system of cages spread across many states, in the name of enthusiastically chanting crowds, for the profit of politically connected entrepreneurs who, flushed with a love of liberty, increased their bottom line bigly with government contracts to house these miserable sons and daughters of rapists and drug dealers.  

Do you think that on our way to the retraining center I would be crass enough to reproach anyone for their natural turning away from horror?   Not at all.   You won’t hear a word of reproach from me.  Why would you?

[1]  One of these wingnuts, the wildly influential, opiate-addled Rush Limbaugh, was decorated with the nation’s highest medal for a civilian, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, hung around his neck by First Lady Melania.   Why not?   Rush was one of the pioneers of this brutal new politics, and one of the most successful promoters of ideas previously considered too insane to publicly advocate.  Without Limbaugh, you don’t get to Trump.   A grateful president acknowledges his debt, without getting too close to Rush, whose late stage cancer might be contagious, after all.  Wind farms also produce cancer, a shit ton of cancer, people are saying.  You can’t be too careful, if you want to live to see the full ripening of your movement towards absolute liberty from government coercion.

Fairness demands that I point out that Mr. Trump and his billionaire son-in-law, Mr. Kushner,  have done what nobody in history has come close to doing.   They brought peace to the Middle East by brokering a historic peace deal between the eternally complaining Palestinians and our great democratic allies in Israel.   

Don’t take it from me, here’s Jared Kushner, author of the detailed eighty page plan that solved an explosive and long-festering problem that has generally been considered insoluble.   Jared summarizes his delicate diplomatic work in ten seconds or less HERE.

Once you remove the last legal restraints on a lawless person, the results are easy to predict.  

I’m haunted by the image of Mr. Hitler, already the dictator of Germany for a year and a half, finally sending the Gestapo out to liquidate his enemies in “The Night of the Long Knives”.   Everyone on Mr. Hitler’s voluminous enemies list was murdered that night, June 30, 1934, including a nationally known ultra-conservative politician and decorated German general named Kurt von Schleicher.  He was shot seven times while sitting at his desk, his wife was also killed; a year later Schleicher’s cook, the only eye witness to the shooting, mysteriously drowned. 

The killing of Schleicher was sold the next morning as an act of self-defense by the men sent to take Schleicher into custody for treason.  The Nazi story in the Nazi-controlled mass media was that they’d shot the accused traitor when he resisted arrest by opening fire on them, as desperate, insane traitors often do.  Two weeks later Mr. Hitler could nonchalantly drop the lie during a Reichstag speech and simply tell the nation: “I had Schleicher shot.”  

Even though “jobs are booming, incomes are soaring, poverty is plummeting, crime is falling, confidence is surging and our country is thriving and highly respected again” I am feeling unaccountably uneasy.  I keep thinking of what our infallible leader tweeted right after Mueller’s investigation “completely and totally exonerated” the man about whose obstruction of justice Robert Mueller III wrote “we could not exonerate him.”  

Mueller, the lifelong Republican who completely exonerated Trump, of course —  a traitor– and the treason of his witch hunting partisan investigators is being criminally investigated by the aggressive Attorney General’s most aggressive investigator even as we joyously celebrate the unprecedented greatness of our great land.  Here’s the part of the president’s tweet I can’t manage to forget:

“It is finally time to turn the tables and bring justice to some very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even Spying or Treason.”

Before he actually gets to do that, I, personally, have to get busy.  Voting every few years for an attractively packaged corporate candidate, the one with the most persuasive public relations campaign, has not prevented the frightening historic moment we find ourselves in.  I have a strong need to sit in a room with other determined people who are organizing to fight the forces of autocracy.  I have a gnawing need not to accept my individual helplessness as a citizen of our great democracy, as even  the pretense of that democracy is poised to perish from the earth.

I found one organization to check out just now, with headquarters in Brooklyn NY.  One of its leaders is one of the women who stopped a sheepish Jeff Flake in an elevator, on the eve of the Judiciary Committee vote to send the nomination of the angry, crying, self-pitying, intemperately partisan “Brett” Kavanaugh to the full Senate, and asked Flake on camera to do the right thing.   The short video went viral.  As the result of this direct public pressure, Flake did as much of the right thing as any Republican not dying of brain cancer can do these days (I refer to John McCain’s thumbs down to narrowly defeat the vote to end the Affordable Care Act, not long before his own death).

We should also pause to note Mitt Romney’s heroic and lonely vote of conscience to allow a fair trial, with witnesses and evidence, prior to the president’s acquittal — an unthinkably radical notion today among Republicans in Trump’s America.  (Susan Collins, shameless apologist for Kavanaugh– among other things–  has to lose her contested election, and good riddance).

Anyway, here’s the organization I want to check out:

The Center for Popular Democracy is an American advocacy group that promotes progressive politics. CPD is a federation of groups that includes some of the old chapters of ACORN. The group’s stated goal is to “envision and win an innovative pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and economic justice agenda.” Wikipedia

But, of course, it’s purely academic now, the vote is in, there will be no actual trial in the Senate and the blameless, or blameworthy, president will be acquitted in this partisan witch hunt too [1].   The Republican position, unified as never before in our nation’s history along a hard “party line” — the president’s defense, come what may — is that a president like Mr. Trump may abuse his enormous powers and repeatedly obstruct the lawful actions of Congress to check and balance this abuse — and these are simply not impeachable offenses, as the demented argument of Alan Dershowitz contends.  

Think about his argument out of the context of the impeachment of a president accused of abuse of power: why would anyone concerned with justice ever try to prevent abuse of power?   It’s just abuse, which is only an actual crime in certain carefully enumerated circumstances.  It’s not like he was kicking a dog in a state that has specific laws against it!

The founding fathers who apparently believed that the will of 51% majority should be the final word on any democratic question, were not concerned, we are told by the president’s most famous lawyer, that a president could abuse his powers if unchecked by Congress and the Courts.   The balancing of the powers of one branch of our government against the overreach of another branch is not what “checks and balances” was intended to enforce, not at all.  There were debates during the drafting of the Constitution about the grounds for presidential impeachment at the time, notes of these debates are available. “Maladministration” was not approved as grounds for impeachment, if the president runs his administration like an inept, even corrupt, fool the remedy is for the People (by their electors in the Electoral College) to vote him out and elect a better one four years later– no harm, no foul.  

Watch this next legalistic sleight of hand carefully, you may have to read it twice to catch the subtle trick.  The same, Dershowitz insists, is true of “misconduct in office” — he claims the Founding Fathers swept this aside as a synonym for “maladministration” and “abuse of power”.   That abuse of power was part of Nixon and Clinton’s impeachments only proves that the smartest lawyers, even Dershowitz himself, at the time, were not smart enough to see through this clearly unconstitutional partisan canard until now. 

79 year-old Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, poised to retire (and who announced his decision to vote with his party for no witnesses and no evidence at trial), issued this statement:

“I worked with other senators to make sure that we have the right to ask for more documents and witnesses, but there is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the United States Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense. …The Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate. 

“The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did. I believe that the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that begins in Iowa on Monday. …Our founding documents provide for duly elected presidents who serve with ‘the consent of the governed,’ not at the pleasure of the United States Congress. Let the people decide.” – Senator Lamar Alexander 

In plain words:  he did it, it was bad, they proved it.   I still love the guy, I mean, not personally, but what he represents for my worldview and my retirement.  It would be a shame to let him get publicly embarrassed by even more evidence and testimony that could only show more dramatically how he is constantly lying about the inappropriate things he did and continues to do, and is now explicitly permitted to do.

Alexander, unsurprisingly, supports the leader of his party for re-election in 2020.

Much more to the ominous point was the statement of Florida Senator  and one of Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination in 2016, Marco Rubio (Little Marco). Little Marco wrapped his idealistic conclusions in a long, twisting legal-style argument, available at the link above (if you have the stomach for it), the gist being:

The first statement translates:  just because the evidence shows somebody is guilty of committing a high crime, punishment is not always called for.  A preemptive, under-the-table pardon is sometimes better for the interests of the 51-49 majority and the higher interests they serve.

Allow me to provide a direct translation of that second part, which is much more troubling than even that first bit:

The president has the undying loyalty of a solid 40% of America, this number never changes much, no matter what.  Many of his supporters are very angry, and rightfully so, having been repeatedly screwed by the system.  Many have a lot of guns.   Most are enraged about the ongoing baseless witch hunts that have constantly tried to damage their hero, since the day he exercised his uncontested right to fire James Comey, the traitorous FBI director who would not swear personal loyalty to the president.  Would not swear personal loyalty!!!   Trump’s fans are heavily armed and easily outraged, as shown at boisterous nightly campaign rallies. Impeaching and removing their champion from office could set off a bloodbath.   I am not ready to take responsibility for a second Civil War, on the eve of the sacred Superbowl.

A little taste of Mr. Rubio’s crack legal analysis:

I also reject the argument that unless we call new witnesses this is not a fair trial. They cannot argue that fairness demands we seek witnesses they did little to pursue.

Nevertheless, new witnesses that would testify to the truth of the allegations are not needed for my threshold analysis, which already assumed that all the allegations made are true.

This high bar I have set is not new for me. In 2014, I rejected calls to pursue impeachment of President Obama, noting that he “has two years left in his term,” and, instead of pursuing impeachment, we should use existing tools at our disposal to “limit the amount of damage he’s doing to our economy and our national security.”

This unified, if not 100% laudable or defendable, party line behind the president brings to mind the old Führerprinzip, the ruling philosophy of the Thousand Year Reich: the leader is always right, even when he’s shown to be completely wrong. Especially in the face of such TREASON!

Nothing to worry about here in America, though, we ain’t fucking Nazis, we’re the world’s greatest democracy.  Kick back and enjoy the Superbowl, you’ve earned it, y’all. 

[1] And, fuck me in the eye, it was literally by a vote of 51-49 suck it!